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Dreams 



and 

itions 



BY L. W. ROGERS 






l»os Angeles 
THEOSOPHICAL, BOOK CONCERN 



!Z6 



Copyright, 1916, By L. W. Rogers. 



10" 

OCT "IS 1916 



GI.A4388SG 



Introduction 

Dreams and premonitions are the most common of 
all psychic phenomena, but they are nevertheless but 
little understood. Modern psychology has accumu- 
lated an immense array of facts which very conclu- 
sively show that the consciousness of the human being 
is something vaster, deeper and altogether more re- 
markable than has generally been supposed. But just 
there the psychologists stop, on the very threshold of 
great discoveries. They are puzzled by the remark- 
able facts and are baffled in their attempts to co-relate 
them" and satisfactorily explain them. 

The facts that have been collected and verified 
show that while some dreams are fantastic, contradic- 
tory and illogical, others are not only coherent and 
logical, but present a marvelous depth of wisdom 
which, when compared to ordinary human knowledge, 
seems almost like omniscience. They sometimes solve 
problems that are impossible of solution by the wak- 
ing consciousness, and frequently actually forecast the 
future by accurately describing an event which has 
not yet occurred but which is to be. Thus people 
have dreamed of their approaching death, or of the 
death of others, stating exactly the nature of the acci- 
dent that would cause it, and describing in detail the 
scenes of the coming tragedy. Yet again the impend- 



DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



ing event presented to the consciousness in the dream 
state may represent only the most trivial of circum- 
tances. Sometimes dreams give warnings about dan- 
gers that are threatening but of which the waking 
consciousness is wholly oblivious. In other cases a 
dream has enabled one to become a rescuer and life- 
saver in some approaching disaster. Occasionally in a 
dream accurate knowledge is obtained of some tragedy 
that is occurring at a distance, or of a crime that has 
been committed, while again missing people have been 
located and lost objects have been recovered through 
dreams. 

The truth of these astounding facts is beyond all 
question. The problem is to explain the facts. Mod- 
ern psychology talks rather vaguely of the subcon- 
scious mind and of the subliminal self, but this really 
explains nothing. We do not advance toward the 
understanding of a mystery simply by applying to it 
a new name. What is that thing called the subcon- 
scious, or the subliminal, and what are its powers and 
its limitations? Unless science can satisfactorily answer 
such questions it has done little indeed toward solving 
these psychological puzzles. 

The most striking characteristic of the recent work 
of writers on dreams is the strong tendency toward a 
purely materialistic interpretation of the phenomena 
observed. Hampered by the wholly inadequate hy- 
pothesis that dreams are caused either by impressions 
made on the physical senses or by desires of the wak- 
ing consciousness, they fill their pages with a discus- 
sion of the class of dreams that may thus be explained 



INTRODUCTION 



and carefully avoid the dreams that are really worthy 
of investigation just because they present facts that 
no such hypothesis can dispose of. It is some cause 
for congratulation, however, that after devoting much 
space to a description of the dreams which illustrate 
the well-known fact that slight external stimuli often 
cause exaggerated brain impressions — as, for exam- 
ple, a drop of water on the face causing a dream of a 
violent rainstorm — these writers often devote a closing 
paragraph to the admission that neither physical nor 
mental causes are sufficient to account for the dreams 
that occasionally forecast the future. Now, it is pre- 
cisely those occasional dreams which the materialistic 
hypothesis can not explain that it is important to 
understand, for they alone can give some clue to the 
real nature of human consciousness. We shall surely 
learn but little by going many times over the .beaten 
path of admitted facts while neglecting to look beyond 
to the unexplored fields so full of fascinating possi- 
bilities. The merest glance is sufficient to show that 
there are two distinct classes of dreams ; that one class 
constitutes a memory, on awakening, of something 
that is related to impressions made on the physical 
senses ; that the other class clearly has no such origin 
and that, instead of being distorted and fantastic, such 
dreams sometimes embody profound wisdom or accu- 
rate knowledge of future events. These two classes 
of dreams no more arise from the same causes than 
the noise made by the revolving record of a phono- 
graph has the same origin as the song of intelligence 
and emotion that flows from it. The one is purely 



DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



mechanical, while the other is purely mental and spir- 
itual, transmitted through a material mechanism. And 
that is the true distincton between the dream arising 
from a physical cause and the dream which owes its 
origin to the higher activities of unfettered conscious- 
ness. The one is produced by the mechanism of con- 
sciousness — the physical brain and its etheric counter- 
part — automatically responding to external stimuli and 
putting together fragmentary brain pictures. The 
other is the result of the activity of the ego impressing 
the physical brain with transcendental truth. 

Psychologists should not be slower than the most 
progressive of physical scientists in accepting the fact 
of clairvoyance and recognizing the part it plays in 
occult research. There is so much of reliable evidence 
on record involving the use of clairvoyance that it 
would be almost as much a waste of time to argue its 
existence as to contend that there is a state of con- 
sciousness known as trance. Those who are familiar 
with the clairvoyant faculty and with the remarkable 
powers of the scientifically trained clairvoyant, will 
need no argument to convince them that here is a 
means of ascertaining the truth about the various 
states of consciousness and their relationship to the 
physical mechanism through which they are ex- 
pressed. But it is of secondary importance whether 
the reality of clairvoyance be admitted or denied; for 
from the phenomena clairvoyantly observed and cata- 
logued it is possible to construct the hypothesis that 
will explain the facts, and all of the known facts, re- 
lated to dreams. Any hypothesis that can do that, 



INTRODUCTION 



legitimately holds its place, and must be regarded as 
sound until a fact is produced that it can not explain. 
The method of acquiring the knowledge from which a 
hypothesis is constructed is of little importance. The 
only question to be considered is whether the hypothe- 
sis can explain the admitted facts. On its ability to 
do that it must stand or fall. 

There is a working hypothesis that logically and 
satisfactorily explains all the remarkable facts, tragic 
or trivial, presented by dreams and premonitions ; that 
will enable us to classify and comprehend them; that 
will assign to each dream neither less nor more im- 
portance than the facts warrant, and that will give to 
those interested in the subject a key to these mysteries 
of the mind. The purpose of the following chapters 
is to present this hypothesis, together with the neces- 
sary facts to fully illustrate the psychic principles in- 
volved in the remarkable dreams herein recorded. 



CHAPTER I 

The Dreamer 

Before we can hope to comprehend dreams we 
must understand the nature and constitution of the 
dreamer. We must free ourselves of some of our 
materialistic conceptions and consider the question of 
what the human being really is. It is the popular 
error of regarding man as being nothing more than a 
physical body and brain that has so sadly retarded 
progress in this field of research. The very phe- 
nomena with which psychology deals should long ago 
have destroyed such an untenable premise, for by that 
materialistic hypothesis it is utterly impossible to ac- 
count for the facts in hand. 

The work of such scientists as Crookes and Lodge 
and Richet has finally turned public attention in the 
right direction. They have presented evidence in over- 
whelming abundance to show that the consciousness 
is not dependent on the physical body for its continu- 
ity; that after bodily death the consciousness survives, 
and that during the life of the physical body the con- 
sciousness may also function quite independently of 
it. So conclusive are the facts gathered by varied and 
long-continued experiments that Sir Oliver Lodge was 
led to declare in a lecture before the Society For The 
Advancement of Science that the. continent of a new 



10 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

world had been discovered, and that already a band 
of daring investigators had landed on its treacherous 
but promising shores. 

This new ''continent" belongs, of course, to the in- 
visible world, and these pioneers of the scientific 
army are not the first to explore it. They are only 
the vanguard of the physical scientists. The occult 
scientists were long ahead of them, and had explored 
and studied the invisible realms. Naturally enough 
they hail the advent of the physical scientists with the 
greatest satisfaction, for they are rapidly confirming 
what the occultists long have taught about the con- 
stitution of man. 

It is only when we have fully before us these 
facts about the real nature of man, and understand 
that he is essentially a spiritual being, a minor part 
only of whose energies come into action in the mate- 
rial realms, that we shall be able to comprehend the 
phenomena of dreams and premonitions. Let us turn 
our attention, then, to the occult side of the problem 
and examine the working hypothesis that satisfac- 
torily explains the facts. 

This hypothesis is that the human being is an in- 
dividualized portion of the universal mind which, in 
turn, is but one expression of the Supreme Being; 
that man is "an image of God'' in the very literal 
sense of having potentially within him the attributes, 
the power and the wisdom of the deity to which he is 
thus so directly related; that his evolution is going 
forward in a world that has both its spiritual and 
physical regions; that he is essentially a soul ,or cen- 



THE DREAMER 11 



ter of consciousness, functioning through a physical 
body which is but the temporary vehicle of the real 
man in the same sense that an automobile is one's 
vehicle, and that this material body — which is in real- 
ity but the clothing of the soul, as the glove is the 
clothing of the hand — is discarded at death without 
in any degree affecting the life and consciousness that 
has temporarily used it for gaining experience in the 
material realms. Man is, therefore, a soul possessing 
a material body that enables him to be conscious and 
active in the physical world. This hypothesis reverses 
the old materialistic conception completely. This is 
man's temporary life. He existed as an intelligence 
before he came down into these material regions 
through birth in a physical body, and when that body 
dies he resumes his relationship to his home plane, 
the spiritual world. But this spiritual world is not 
merely a realm of thought. It is a world of form and 
a life of activity, of deeper, wider knowledge than the 
physical, an ethereal world, but still a world of 
thought, of action and of enterprise. It is a world of 
tenuous matter, a huge globe, not distant in space 
but enclosing and interpenetrating our own as the 
ether, postulated by science, surrounds and interpene- 
trates all physical objects. It is sometimes called the 
astral world. This ethereal world as a whole natur- 
ally has its sub-divisions, but for the purpose of under- 
standing the phenomena of dreams it is not necessary 
to introduce details. It is necessary, however, to com- 
prehend the relationship between the physical and 
astral regions, and between the physical and astral 



12 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

portions of the mechanism of consciousness. The rela- 
tionship of the former is that of a world within a 
world — the astral globe being composed of matter so 
tenuous that it encloses the physical globe, interpene- 
trates it throughout, and extends far beyond it in 
space. As a ball of fibrous matter might be immersed 
in liquid matter, saturated with it, and completely 
surrounded by it, so the physical globe is interpene- 
trated and enveloped by the matter of the astral 
world. The astral world, then, is not remote but is 
here in the midst of us, about us, through us and be- 
yond us. 

The relationship of the physical and astral bodies 
of a human being are of a like nature. The tenuous 
matter of the astral body is within and without the 
physical body, extending somewhat beyond it, and 
constituting an exact duplicate of it: Of course,; 
neither of these bodies is in any sense the man. Both 
are parts of the complex mechanism through which 
he manifests himself, and the astral body is a higher 
and fuller expression of the man than the physical 
body is. Indeed, the latter is merely the body of 
action. It is only the instrument of the man, which 
enables him to be present in the physical world, while 
the astral body is that with which he feels and through 
which thought and emotion are sent downward, or 
outward, into the physical body. The physical body 
has no part in the generation of thought. It is merely 
the means by which thought and emotion are ex- 
pressed in the material world. Therefore, thought and 



THE DREAMER 



emotion do not come to an end when the physical 
body is inactive on account of either sleep or death. 

These two encasements of the real man — the phys- 
ical and astral bodies — separate from each other under 
certain conditions, the latter being used as a vehicle 
of consciousness while the former is quiescent. A 
diver uses a boat and a diver's suit. Both are neces- 
sary for the work he is to do. But he may leave the 
boat and use only the diving suit for a time. The 
boat served the purpose of enabling him to go from 
point to point on the surface. The diving suit en- 
ables him to explore a region in which the boat is 
not available. Neither is the man. They are merely 
the mechanism that he uses. So it is with his visible 
and invisible bodies. The visible physical body may 
be discarded and the invisible astral body may then 
be used as the vehicle of the consciousness, or soul — 
the man himself — in the more ethereal regions. 

But what are the conditions under which the con- 
sciousness withdraws from the physical body and 
functions through the astral body? One is sleep and 
the other is death. Sleep always indicates the sepa- 
ration of the visible from the invisible body. Whether 
the sleep is natural, or is induced by hypnotism or 
trance, it indicates the reparation of the bodies. There 
can be no such separation without sleep and no sleep 
without such separation. Sleep is simply the absence 
of the man from his physical body. That is why it 
is asleep. It is not being used by the man. His 
intelligence is not flowing through it. He is not 
there. 



14 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

But how, then, it may be asked, does the breathing 
continue and the heart beat if the body is without 
its tenant? How does the worm entombed within 
the chrysalis become the butterfly? How do creatures 
below the line of intellect in the evolutionary scale 
live without thinking? Our physical bodies are not 
dependent upon our intellects. We do not con- 
sciously direct the beating of the heart nor the 
processes of digestion during the waking hours. The 
activities necessary to the life and well-being of the 
body go on until its death whether we think of them 
or do not, and whether the consciousness is functioning 
through the body or is withdrawn from it. 

Death is the other cause of the separation of the 
astral body from the physical body, and the only 
difference between sleep and death is that in sleep 
the man withdraws his consciousness temporarily 
from the physical body and later returns to it. The 
act of withdrawing is what we call falling asleep. 
Returning is what we call awakening. The instant 
the consciousness is withdrawn the physical body is 
asleep. That is what sleep is — the separation of the 
astral body from the physical body. The soul, the 
real man, has temporarily laid down his instrument 
of activity in the visible world. It is then like a 
vacant house with drawn curtains until its absent 
tenant returns to it, and begins to send his conscious- 
ness through it. During his absence he has been 
using his astral body as his vehicle of consciousness, 
just as the diver temporarily abandoned his boat for 
his diving suit. 



THE DREAMER 15 



In death the consciousness has been withdrawn 
from the physical body for the last time. The absence 
is permanent. The body has worn out or has been 
injured beyond the possibility of repair. The soul, 
the real man, can not return to it because it no longer 
serves the purpose for which it came into existence. 
It is a worthless machine, worn out through long 
use, broken suddenly by violence or wasted slowly 
by disease, as the case may be. During all the tem- 
porary absences called sleep there was a magnetic 
connection between* the astral and physical bodies of 
the man. But when death comes the tie between the 
soul and the material bod)' is broken and there is no 
possibility of returning to it. And that is what death 
is — the severing of the bond between the visible and 
invisible bodies. The physical body is then dead and 
disintegration begins. But the real man, the indi- 
vidual consciousness, has not ceased to live. He has 
merely lost the instrument that connected him with 
the material world, and which enabled him to move 
about on it and be known to others there. He is 
physically dead because he has lost the physical body. 
He is not mentally and emotionally dead because he 
has not lost that part of his mechanism of conscious- 
ness which is the seat of^ thought and emotion. The 
physical body enabled him to express his life in the 
visible world but it was no more the man than a 
phonograph is the person who sings into it. If the 
phonograph is broken the only change to the singer 
is that he has lost the instrument of his expression, 
not his consciousness. 



16 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

It may, at first thought, seem grotesque to speak 
of a man as possessing more than one body. Being 
to many an unaccustomed thought it may sound as 
bizarre as to say that a person may occupy two 
houses at one and the same time. But nevertheless 
the idea represents scientific accuracy. As a matter 
of fact we do live in two houses whenever we live in 
any house. Science asserts that every physical atom 
has its duplicate in etheric matter, by which it is 
surrounded and interpenetrated. Every building, 
every brick and board, has its counterpart in unseen 
matter. The immobile mountains, the flowing streams, 
the swaying tree-tops, the waving fields of grain, 
the placid lakes and the ocean tempest tossed, all 
have their exact counterparts in the invisible matter 
that reproduces the world in phantom form. 

So much science is able to demonstrate and the 
very nature of this truth compels us to postulate still 
other and rarer grades of matter than the ether. It is 
the next rarer grade of invisible matter that the 
scientists almost brought within the catalog of ascer- 
tained facts by discovering the electron and proving 
that the atom is a minute universe in itself. 

When we hold a pebble in the hand we do not see 
all of the pebble. It consists of its visible and invis- 
ible parts, and sight and touch can deal with but one 
of them. The trained clairvoyant would see what 
others see and also the grades of subtile matter 
surrounding it and interpenetrating it. Now, since 
this surrounding and interpenetrating relationship of 
seen and unseen matter is as true of one object as 



THE DREAMER 17 



another, the physical body is no exception. Dupli- 
cating it exactly in form and feature is the tenuous 
matter of a rarer grade, surrounding and permeating 
it. The consciousness functions through these two 
bodies as one complex instrument, yet they are 
separable. An aeroplane is equipped for movement 
both on the ground and through the air. It may 
lose its wheels without losing its power to soar. It 
has merely lost that part of its mechanism that en- 
abled it to operate in connection with the grosser 
element. So with man. When he loses his physical 
body it limits his field of activities but does not 
change the man himself nor impair his ability to 
function elsewhere. 

The dreamer, then, is vastly more than a physical 
body with a mysterious brain. We are not dealing 
with a machine, a portiori of which "secretes thought 
as the liver secretes bile," as a scientist of a past 
generation ventured to guess, but with a spiritual 
being functioning through a material body containing 
a brain that is at once an instrument of thought and 
a limitation of consciousness; for if thought and 
emotion have a superphysical origin a large percentage 
of their original energy must be expended in attaining 
material expression. Therefore the dreamer, in his 
waking hours, is expressing but a faint reflection of 
his true consciousness, which is necessarily limited 
by its material media. As a fragment of the universal 
mind he- possesses within his unfettered self a wisdom 
wholly foreign to his physical existence. The home 
plane of his being is above the limitations of those 



18 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

conditions of consciousness which we know as time 
and space. He is temporarily blinded by matter 
while functioning through the material body. He 
identifies himself with it and loses conscious con- 
nection with his higher estate. But when he escapes 
the limitations of the physical body, either in sleep or 
in death, and begins to function through his astral 
body he is a stage nearer to reality and has, in some 
degree, a transcendental grasp of human affairs. In 
the case of sleep he returns, at the moment of awaken- 
ing, from the higher state of consciousness to the 
lower level of physical plane consciousness and is 
again subjected to the limitations of the physical 
brain. But the physical brain has its counterpart in 
astral matter and it is the astral form in which the 
consciousness, the real man, has been functioning 
during the hours of sleep. His experiences during 
that time have given rise to thoughts and emotions 
which are not impressed upon the physical brain 
because it has had no part in them. They have set 
up vibrations only in the subtiler portions of the 
mechanism of consciousness. Ordinarily upon the 
re-uniting of the astral and physical bodies the 
vibrations of the tenuous astral matter are not com- 
municated to the matter of the physical brain and 
there is no memory of what has occurred during the 
period of slumber. Occasionally, however, there is a 
rare combination of physical, astral and mental, 
conditions that makes memory possible and the 
recollection is called a dream. But all memories of 
the sleeping hours are not recollections of astral 



THE DREAMER 19 



events and it is only after some effort and experience 
that it becomes possible to distinguish between the 
memories which represent the adventures of the soul 
in the astral region and the brain pictures caused by 
the automatic activity of the physical brain, in which 
external stimuli sometimes play a most dramatic 
part. Nevertheless the two distant classes of dreams, 
those caused by automatic physiological activity, 
occasionally associated with excitation outside the 
body, and those which represent the experiences of 
the man himself in the ethereal realms, are, as analysis 
will show, as different in their characteristics as are 
the causes which produce them. 



CHAPTER II 

The Materialistic Hypothesis 
Is Inadequate 

Some modern writers have labored mightily to 
show that dreams may be explained by a purely 
materialistic hypothesis. Coincidence has been put 
under such stress as to raise the accidental to the 
dignity of the causal. Telepathy has been relied upon 
to cover a multitude of lame conclusions. To explain 
strange facts we have been given far-fetched solutions 
that require more credulity for their acceptance than 
any fairy tale of our childhood days. A writer will 
cheerfully set out to give a satisfactory material solu- 
tion for any and all dreams and will explain that 
the reason why a certain lady dreamed of the correct 
number of an unknown address was possibly because 
she had seen that particular number on the paging 
of a book the day before ! Another relates the story 
of a dinner party being interrupted by one of their 
number being suddenly impressed with the feeling 
that he must go immediately to a barn not far away; 
that an undefinable "something" was wrong there. 
He had no idea what it might be but he had an inner 
impulsion with the barn as a destination. It was an 
unreasonable but irresistible impulse to go imme- 
diately to examine the barn, and apparently for no 



22 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

reason at all. None of the others shared the feeling 
but upon reaching the barn they were astonished to 
find that a small blaze had started in some unknown 
way and there would have been a conflagration but 
for their timely arrival. 

Here we have a phenomenon not easily explained. 
But it does not trouble the writer who presents it in 
order to show how simple it all is. "He smelled the 
smoke !" triumphantly exclaims this Sherlock Holmes 
of psychic riddles. And when, in such a case, it is 
shown that the feeling of anxiety positively antedated 
the starting of the blaze by some minutes he falls 
back on the final resort of the "subconscious self," 
quite overlooking the fact that that is begging the 
question and really explains nothing. 

In one of the leading monthly periodicals a well- 
known psychologist for a time conducted a department 
on psychology and the announced purpose was to 
explain away puzzling psychic experiences in daily 
affairs. The thoughtful reader will find it difficult to 
believe that the people who propounded the questions 
were satisfied with the answers but they are appar- 
ently the best that modern psychology is prepared 
to give them. However, if the "solutions" serve no 
other purpose they are at least useful in illustrating 
the trivial arguments presented and the astounding 
conclusions reached. 

It was not so long ago that the fact of telepathy 
was struggling for slight recognition and was knock- 
ing almost unheard at the door of modern psychology. 
Slowly its status changed from the condition of an 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 23 

outcast to tardy recognition of its usefulness, and the 
rapidly accumulating mass of psychic facts is likely 
to raise it soon to the importance of becoming the last 
hope of the ultra-materialist. Our psychologist of the 
periodical above mentioned had not proceeded far 
with his department until he opened his monthly 
digest with this declaration : 

u In the many letters received by me since I began 
to discuss psychical problems in these columns, one 
fact has been increasingly evident — the actuality of 
telepathy or thought transference. Even if I had 
started with a disbelief in telepathy — which I assur- 
edly did not — I could not have retained my skepticism 
after studying the letters my readers have sent me. 

"From every State in the Union, from Canada, 
England, France, and other European countries, has 
come evidence, testifying with cumulative force that 
in some mysterious way one mind can in truth com- 
municate directly with another mind, though half 
the world apart." 

Without the fact of telepathy the attempt of the 
psychologist to explain some of the dreams submitted 
would, indeed, put him in hard case ; for even with 
telepathy, and telepathy strained and twisted out of 
all semblance to its legitimate self, his hypothesis is 
still hopelessly weak and utterly inadequate. 

Telepathy — the communication between mind and 
mind without material means — has been demonstrated 
by the simple method of one person acting as the 
''sender" and being handed a written word or a 
simple drawing upon a piece of paper supplied by 



24 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

the experimenter, who has himself at that moment 
conceived it. The ''sender" fixes his attention upon it. 
At that moment another person who is acting as the 
"receiver," stationed at a distance of, let us say, a 
hundred miles, waiting with pencil in hand, repro- 
duces the word or drawing with more or less accuracy 
as the case ma}^ be. By the hypothesis laid down in 
Chapter I the explanation is as simple as wireless 
telegraphy. Thought is a force as certainly as elec- 
tricity is a force. When a mental picture is formed 
in the mind, grades of subtile matter rarer than that 
of the brain are thrown into vibration and reproduce 
themselves in the mind of the "receiver" after the 
fashion of the vibrations initiated by the sending 
instrument of wireless telegraphy. But telepathy has 
its limitations as certainly as telegraphy has. A 
thought, a feeling, a mood, an emotion may be tele- 
pathically communicated from one person to another 
and apparently regardless of any intervening space 
which the limits of the earth can impose. In the 
case of people with minds well developed and capable 
of forming strong and clear mental images a more 
extended communication would conceivably be pos- 
sible. The scientific experiments thus far made have, 
however, resulted in no such accomplishment. The 
most that can be said to be proved for telepathy is 
that communication is a truth of nature and that it 
may occur in cases where, although the parties are 
widely separated, there is either strong effort to com- 
municate or where there is a bond of sympathy 
between them. When people are together and their 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 25 

minds are running along the same lines it may occur 
under the most ordinary circumstances. But we must 
not overlook the part played by facial expression in 
reading the thoughts of others, nor of the physical 
conditions that shape thought in a common mold as, 
for example, when your friend rises to open a window 
before you can utter the request that is in your mind. 
He may have thought of it because he was moved by 
your thought or only because he, too, was uncom- 
fortable. There are other cases not at all susceptible 
to such explanation. One often gets telepathically the 
thought of another who is near him but it is partial 
and fragmentary. He does not get a complete in- 
ventory of the content of the other's mind. So far 
as casual experience and scientific experiment have 
gone it has been made fairly clear that while telepathy 
is common it marks out an extremely narrow -field in 
psychological phenomena. Deprived of the connecting 
link of personal presence and conversation, or ties of 
close sympathy, it seems to be effective only when 
the thought is stimulated by some powerful emotion 
like sudden and serious illness, accident or death. 
When we go beyond that we are in the realm of 
assumption and speculation. To assume that because 
one mind can catchy a thought or emotion from 
another telepathically, one person therefore gets from 
another's mind without effort or desire all the details 
relating to something that individual has seen or 
heard, is as absurd as to assume that because wireless 
telegraphy brings a message that has pessed through 
the mind of the sending operator the message might 



26 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



in some mysterious way give a knowledge of every- 
thing else known to that individual. And yet just 
such fantastic and groundless assumption is what our 
psychologist is forced to, in the effort to explain some 
of the cases submitted. Here is an example : 

"A trifle over a year ago, contemplating a trip 
East, I decided to rent my furnished six-room apart- 
ment. It was taken by two young ladies, one 
employed, the other the homekeeper. Some three 
weeks later I had the most distressing dream. I 
thought I went over to my apartment, only to find 
everything in most dreadful confusion. The sun 
porch had been converted into a temporary bedroom, 
and in my own bedroom, where usually stood the 
dressing table (now on the porch) stood a small iron 
bed, white, with everything upset and dirty. In my 
dream I also saw that the young ladies had taken in 
as boarders a married couple with two little ones. 
Well, I immediately forgot the dream, but several 
nights later had the same dream again. Imagine my 
surprise at learning after my return home, that just 
what I had dreamed had actually occurred, even to 
the little white bed." 

Then follows the psychologist's explanation. He 
says: 

"On the facts as stated this dream must be regarded 
as telepathic. There is, of course, a possibility that 
the dreamer, before leaving home, had, without being 
aware of it, heard her prospective tenants talking about 
their plans for taking in boarders, changing the furni- 



\ 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 27 

ture, etc. The dream would then be merely the 
emergence of a subconscious memory." 

The theory of telepathy in this case is so obviously 
inadequate that our psychologist hastens to add that 
there is another possible explanation and then falls 
back upon the safe vagueness of the subconscious 
memory. But is his explanation even within the 
realm of probability? There may be the possibility, 
he argues, that she had heard talk of taking in board- 
ers and changing the furniture S But even if that had 
happened and even if we were to grant some connection 
between that fact and the dream, how could she have 
obtained from the knowledge that they would take 
boarders the fact that the boarders would be a man 
and his wife and two little children? and if we grant 
that she unconsciously and in some mysterious way 
absorbed the information that they would change the 
furniture, how could that possibly enable her to know 
that her dressing table would be moved to the porch 
and that a small white iron bed would be put in its 
place? 

There is no evidence, however, that she had heard 
such conversation, or had the slightest hint that any 
such thing was contemplated. Indeed, there is good 
ground for the belief that it was all a most disagreeable 
surprise to her. She describes the discovery as a 
"most distressing dream." The reasonable assump- 
tion from the language employed by her is that she 
was astonished and annoyed and was very much 
disappointed in her tenants. Clearly neither of the 



\ 



28 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

explanations of the psychologist really explains this 
dream. * 

Our psychologist turns his attention to premoni- 
tions with no better results. One of his correspondents 
submits to him the following experience : 

"One Sunday evening during the 'Maine rum war' 
the pastor of my church announced that Dr. Wilbur 
F. Krafts, then touring the State in the interests of 
prohibition, would speak the next day at noon in the 
public square. Though interested like many others in 
keeping the prohibitory law, it was by that time, I 
suppose, 'on my nerves,' and I wanted to hear no more 
on the subject and left the church as soon as possible. 
That night I dreamed of returning from my work at 
noon, hearing the sound of music — 'Marching Through 
Georgia' — and going to the public square. There I 
saw a crowd surrounding a group of three or four 
men. Near the speaker stood my pastor, who, noticing 
me, made his way through the crowd and spoke to me. 
At that point I awoke. 

"On the forenoon following I had no recollection of 
my dream and at noon heard music, evidently in the 
public square. As I started for the square I noticed 
that the air was 'Marching Through Georgia.' Before 
I reached the square the music changed to another 
air as in my dream, which I then remembered. In the 
square I recognized in Dr. Krafts the speaker of my 
dream. My pastor was near him and, noticing me, 
came to me with a message from his wife. Until then 
I had never seen Dr. Krafts, nor heard anything in 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 29 

particular about him, never had him in mind at all 
and do not think I had ever seen his picture." 

To this the psychologist replies : 

"Some psychologists, contrasting the complete 
forgetf ulness until noon with the vividness and full- 
ness of the dream detail recalled by happenings in the 
square, would insist that the whole dream memory 
was an unconscious fabrication. But the likelihood 
is that since, as she says, the prohibition campaign 
was on her nerves, she did dream something about 
the meeting to take place the next day. She may 
easily have dreamed of Dr. Krafts himself for, in spite 
of her disclaimer, it would be strange indeed if she 
had never seen a newspaper or poster portrait of him 
printed in connection with the campaign. If she did 
dream of Dr. Krafts she would be all the more likely, 
because of her surprise at recognizing him in the 
square, to fuse the true details of her dream memory 
with details of which she had not really dreamed." 

Perhaps nothing could appear more absurd to one 
who has had such an experience than to call it "uncon- 
scious fabrication." If that is what such evidence 
would be called by "some psychologists" they have 
certainly not been qualified for their work by any 
personal experience. One of the outstanding facts 
about such dreams is their vividness and lifelike 
reality. That she did not remember the dream during 
the forenoon is no evidence whatever against its 
reality. What followed was perfectly natural. When 
she heard the same airs played by the band in the 
same sequence and saw the same figures she had seen 



30 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



in the dream it is impossible that she could fail to 
recall it. To say that she may have "fused" the true 
details of her dream with the details of the events that 
followed is a far-fetched possibility with no relation- 
ship to probability, and a theory is weak indeed that 
must rely on such an assumption. Akin to it is the 
hazard that she must have seen Dr. Kraft's picture 
and forgotten it. Yet if seeing his forgotten picture 
had enabled her to identify the man, would not seeing 
the man enable her to remember having previously 
seen his picture? But the identity of the speaker, 
which is so unsatisfactorily explained, is of no more 
importance than the movements of the pastor. In 
the dream he notices her, comes through the crowd 
and speaks to her, at which point she awakens. In 
the events of the next day he does precisely the same 
thing. There is apparently no sound reason what- 
ever for doubting any part of the evidence. 

In another premonitory dream the account runs 
as follows: 

a My mother, an Englishwoman and a deeply re- 
ligious woman, dreamed she saw my sister lying 
dead, with two doctors in white beside her. My 
mother was greatly distressed over this, but as the 
weeks passed she gradually forgot it, until one day, 
several months after the dream, my sister had to go 
to Dublin for a slight operation. Just before com- 
mencing they allowed mother to see her and her 
dream was before her. She recognized it instantly. 
My sister was unconscious and on the operating table, 
while a doctor stood on each side." 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 31 

Which the psychologist thus explains : 

"And, no doubt, at the time of the dream the 
sister's health was such that her mother would con- 
sciously or subconsciously be aware that an operation 
might some day be necessary. Out of this conscious 
or subconscious knowledge the dream would logically 
develop, featuring the attending physicians in the 
regular costume of the operating room." 

Suppose that for the sake of the argument we 
were to grant the overworked theory of ''subconscious 
knowledge," and then for good measure were to throw 
in the admission of the asssumption — for which there 
is no fact in evidence — that the daughter's health was 
bad at the time of the dream. How, even then, can 
the dream be thus satisfactorily explained? If the 
mysterious "subconscious knowledge" furnished the 
information that there would be an operation, fhen 
what put two doctors in the dream instead of one, or 
three? When relatives are admitted to see patients 
before an operation they usually see them just before 
the ether is administered. In this instance there must 
have been some unexpected delay in arriving or some 
other miscalculation which changed the ordinary 
course. How did it happen that in the dream the 
mother saw her daughter apparently dead, lying 
between the two doctors, with which details the later 
event exactly corresponded ? 

If the dream in this case was the waking memory 
of the ego's dramatization of approaching events it 
is easy to understand why the mother thought her 
daughter was dead. Having taken the anaesthetic 



32 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

she appeared to lie dead. But if the dream came 
because the mother was "consciously or subcon- 
sciously aware that an operation would sometime 
be necessary" why did she not dream that her 
daughter was not dead but had merely taken ether? 

None of the explanations of our psychologist will 
pass the test of analysis. No thoughtful person can 
fail to observe that, in almost every case, he is 
obliged to assume facts that are not in evidence, and 
that he proceeds to build up an imaginary structure 
and surround the case with conditions which there 
is no reason to believe really exist. When the facts 
which are in evidence are antagonistic to his hypothe- 
sis he calmly ignores the facts and holds that the 
witnesses are mistaken ! He is a poor attorney who 
could not win a case were he permitted to be judge 
and jury as well as advocate. 

The ease with which our psychologist can dispose 
of a difficulty is well illustrated by the following case 
and explanation : 

"My mother tells the following story. When I 
was several months old she one night put me to sleep 
in my cradle sound and well as usual, and then went 
to sleep herself. In the night she was awakened by a 
dreadful nightmare. She dreamed she was standing 
over my newly made grave. Getting out of bed, she 
rushed to my cradle. I was as pale as a sheet, my 
breath came fast and heavy, and she could not wake 
me for some time. By the time the doctor arrived 
I had gone into violent convulsions. My mother to 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 33 



this day says her dream had saved my life. Can you 
explain it?" 

And here is his explanation : 

"What undoubtedly had happened was that the 
noise, however slight, made by the stricken child, had 
disturbed the watchful mother's sleep, giving rise to the 
symbolical and most fortunate nightmare." 

Now, observe that the child had been put to bed 
in her usual health. There was nothing to cause the 
mother the slightest uneasiness. Had the psycholo- 
gist said that any slight noise made by the child would 
awaken the mother the statement could easily be ac- 
cepted. But when he asserts that what must have 
happened was that some slight noise from the child 
caused the mother to have a most fortunate nightmare, 
the statement would be of greater value in the col- 
umns of a humorous paper than in a serious study of 
psychology. 

The laughable extremity to which our psychologist 
is pushed in his determination to explain everything 
from the material viewpoint comes out well in another 
case which is not a dream at all, but which furnishes a 
fine example of his method. The experience is stated as 
follows : 

''One summer a party of us were walking along 
a mountain trail, Indian fashion. I was the last in 
line, and kept my eyes on the group ahead. We came 
to a clump of trees beside the path. The rest kept 
right on, but something prompted me to turn to the 
left and leave the path. I did so, and going around 
the clump I heard screams, and all ran back. Coiled, 



34 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

ready to strike, was a large rattler that disappeared 
into the bushes. If I had gone on, instead of around 
the trees, I should surely have been bitten by the 
snake." 

Then comes his explanation : 

"A capital instance, this, of the power of the eye — 
or, in this case, perhaps the ear — to perceive more than 
one consciousl}' comprehends, and* by this perceiving, 
to impel to action which seems to be quite without 
reason and consequently mysterious/' 

We are here asked to believe that a person sees or 
hears a rattlesnake near the path, and acts upon the 
knowledge to avoid the danger without being con- 
scious of the existence of the reptile! Could the de- 
mand upon credulity go further than that? One of 
the most remarkable things about the psychologist of 
the materialistic type is that while he constantly warns 
against w r hat he regards as the blind and unreasoning 
faith of those who see intelligence and purpose in all 
forces, however apparently chaotic in their expres- 
sions, he nevertheless offers explanations of phenom- 
ena that set at naught all common sense experience 
and place an impossible tax upon credulity. A 
hypothesis accepted by such scientists as Crookes. 
Lodge, Wallace, Flammarion, Richet and others of 
equal standing in the scientific world, is disregarded, 
while, in order to account for all that occurs by the 
employment of purely physical factors, special con- 
ditions are assumed, witnesses are discredited, facts 
are ignored, and in the name of science conclusions 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 35 

are drawn that represent nothing less than the most 
arrant nonsense. 

With the vague, elusive and undefined "subcon- 
sciousness" to fall back upon in an emergency, there 
is always a safe retreat. And that assurance may be 
doubly sure our psychologist says : 

"Let me urge my readers never to forget that any- 
thing which has ever got into the mind, may, under 
special conditions, be externalized as an hallucination, 
or may crop up into the recollection in the form of a 
dream." 

When we add to that declaration the privilege of 
assuming the "special conditions" that may be neces- 
sary to make any particular case fit the materialistic 
interpretation, it certainly ought to go a long way 
in helping our psychologist to harmonize his theory 
with the facts! 

There is no danger of defeat in the arena of logic 
if there is some byway permitting retirement beyond 
the reach of logic at any critical moment. Forty 
years ago when the idea of evolution was getting a 
foothold in the thought of western civilizaton I knew 
an estimable and pious old gentleman whose mind 
was somewhat scientific in trend but ultra-orthodox 
in faith. He would notdeny a scientific fact or prin- 
ciple, as he understood it, but he clung tenaciously 
to the old idea of the literal interpretation of the Bible 
which the evolutionary hypothesis was invalidating, 
and when he was asked to explain how a certain thing 
could be so and so, as alleged, when it was in viola- 
tion of the scientific facts he would reply, "Well, it is 



36 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

the Lord's way." No matter what altogether impos- 
sible or utterly contradictory matter had to be ex- 
plained it was met with the solemn declaration that 
''It is the Lord's way." And all the time the old gen- 
tleman evidently believed that to be conclusive, and 
appeared to be serenely unconscious of the fact that 
anything imaginable can be justified by the man who 
merely has to declare "it is the Lord's way." 

Our psychologst is equally safe. His line of re- 
treat to "subconsciousness" is always open. If a 
dream accurately forecasts the future it is because 
the dreamer knew of some fact which, by the won- 
derful alchemy of the subconsciousness, supplied the 
future details. If one is in a strange country which 
he has never before visited, and suddenly becomes 
aware that it is all as familiar as his own garden, and 
then proceeds to describe to his friends what lies 
ahead along the road, it is because he has somewhere 
had a glimpse of a picture — and forgotten it — and that 
wonderful subconsciousness accounts for the rest. If 
one is moving in the darkness toward a precipice a 
yard away, in perfect ignorance of its existence, and 
feels himself suddenly bodily pushed backward when 
there is no living being near him, why, its a halluci- 
nation representng ideas latent in his consciousness. 
If you are meandering along a forest path, and are 
suddenly seized with an impulse to leave it for no 
imaginable reason, and come back to it a few feet 
further on, and then discover that you thus probably 
escaped death, it is because your subconsciousness 
managed the matter. You saw or heard the snake, 



MATERIALISTIC HYPOTHESIS INADEQUATE 37 

but didn't know it, or you would have known why 
you turned aside. If you have a dream of future 
events as they afterward really transpire, it is only 
a coincidence unless the details are all in agreement 
with the dream, and if they are then you didn't 
dream them ; not because you are consciously fabri- 
cating, but because the mysterious subconsciousness 
that previously saved you from snakes is now leading 
you to "fuse" the details and appear in the role of an 
unconscious liar ; and, finally, if you have a dream that 
presents facts which cannot possibly be explained by 
the material hypothesis, you are simply mistaken 
about it — you only thought you had a dream, because 
if you really had had such a dream it would not be 
in agreement with the materialistic theory! 

It is, of course, true that some dreams and appar- 
ent premonitions can be explained by material facts. 
It is equally true that a great many dreams can not 
be thus explained. A close study of them will at once 
make this apparent and show the utter inadequacy 
the materialistic hypothesis. Any hypothesis is serv- 
iceable only so long as it can explain the known facts. 
The moment it fails to explain an established fact it 
falls to the ground, no matter how many other facts 
it may have satisfactorily explained. The belief that 
the world was flat and stationary was at one time gen- 
eral. That theory satisfactorily explained the known 
facts. But when other facts were discovered that 
could not be thus explained the theory instantly col- 
lapsed. The only question involved was whether 
there were really new facts to be dealt with. The 



38 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



world discovered that it had been considering only 
part of the facts. Additional facts destroyed the old 
hypothesis; and that is precisely the case in the mat- 
ter here under discussion. The facts have not all been 
considered. They have either been completely ignored 
or have been waived aside with the assumption that 
the most trivial and far-fetched explanations are suffi- 
cient to dispose of them. 

The dreams that are utterly beyond explanation 
by the materialistic hypothesis constitute evidence as 
reliable as the others, and are furnished by witnesses 
who differ in no way from those who have furnished 
the details of the few dreams that involve no super- 
physical factors. A glance at some of these dreams 
will show how hopelessly the old theory breaks down 
in their presence. Many of them are dreams of dis- 
covery which bring to light that which is lost and 
under circumstances that eliminate telepathy and 
vague hints at subconscious possibilities. Others are 
in the nature of warnings of impending danger which 
does not exist at the time the warning is given. 
Sometimes they enable the dreamer after awakening 
to give life-saving assistance to other people. The 
fact that some dreams can be fully and satisfactorily 
explained on purely material grounds does not throw 
a single ray of light upon the mystery of other dreams 
in which the dreamer obtains detailed knowledge of 
what transpired during the night at a distance, or 
the dream that foreshadows an approaching tragedy. 



CHAPTER III 

Dreams of Discovery 

Most people who are able to give testimony upon 
such matters are unwilling to be personally mentioned 
for a double reason; they dread the possible ridicule 
of the unthinking, and they dislike the task of reply- 
ing to letters of inquiry which the publicity of the 
facts may call out. Fortunately there are some who, 
in the interest of truth, are willing to be witnesses 
for it regardless of the unpleasantness involved. The 
extremely interesting and remarkable dream selected 
to open this chapter was related to me by Mrs. 'Reeves 
Snyder, a well-known resident of Springfield, Ohio, 
with permission to use her name. Her mother had 
died rather suddenly after a short illness. When the 
time arrived for adjusting the financial accounts it 
was discovered that certain bonds were missing. They 
were not in the strong box at the bank where they 
were supposed to be, nor had any member of the 
family the slightest knowledge that could lead to 
their recovery. They well knew that they would not 
have been disposed of without their consent and ad- 
vice. Every conceivable nook and cranny of the 
house was searched and re-searched, but the mystery 
of the missing bonds remained unsolved. The loss 
was a large one, and as time passed without develop- 



40 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

ing the slightest clue to the missing property the 
daughter's anxiety grew. 

One night Mrs. Reeves Snyder dreamed. She 
found herself in the presence of her dead mother, who 
smilingly said, ''Don't worry any more about those 
bonds, you'll find them in the morning. I had them 
at the house just before I was taken ill, and had them 
in my hand when I went up to the garret floor, and 
laid them aside while busy there. I forgot them when 
leaving — and then came the illness and confusion that 
followed. But they are there, and you will find them 
in an old tomato can, covered with a board, near the 
end of the large black trunk." 

Awakening, the dreamer related the startling story 
to her husband, who was wholly incredulous. But 
she herself had not the slightest doubt that she had 
seen and conversed with her recently departed 
mother. We can easily imagine the impatience with 
which she awaited the coming of morning, and with 
which she hurried to her mother's late residence at 
the earliest possible moment. As she approached the 
house her father and sister appeared on the verandah. 
Now it seems that Mrs. Reeves Snyder had the repu- 
tation of being a dreamer of remarkable dreams, and 
her father, who was strongly inclined to conservatism, 
called out as she approached, "Have you had another 
dream?" To this she replied that she had dreamed of 
her mother. Pie interrupted her with the remark 
that her sister also had dreamed of her mother, and 
added that before her sister spoke of it at all he 
wished to hear her full story. It was related to him 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 41 

as above given, and then the amazed skeptic said that 
her sister had just told him of her own dream, which 
was identical in every detail. She had also dreamed 
that her dead mother came to her during the night, 
recounting the same story of the lost bonds, with the 
same minute instructions for recovering them. To- 
gether the three made their way to the place desig- 
nated and there, in an empty tin can covered with a 
board, lay the missing bonds ! 

It requires no argument to show that the explana- 
tion of these facts is utterly beyond the possibilities 
of the materialistic hypothesis. But if it be true, as 
set forth in the hypothesis stated in Chapter I, that 
sleep and death differ only in that one is temporary 
and the other permanent release from the physical 
body, and that in each case the consciousness is then 
functioning through a vehicle of astral matter, then 
communication between the "dead" and the living is 
a perfectly natural thing during the hours of sleep. 
With some people this memory of the meeting may 
be vivid and realistic. With others it may be vague, 
unsubstantial and fleeting. With still others there 
may be no memory at all impressed upon the physical 
brain, yet the experience may have been as impressive 
to the person's consciousness at the moment as in the 
case of the others who did remember upon awakening. 

In what other possible way can the facts be ex- 
plained? The only person who knew where the bonds 
rested had been dead some weeks. No other person 
even knew that the bonds had been removed from 
their accustomed place of security. They were in a 



42 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

place where nobody would have thought for a moment 
of searching for them. They would have been safe 
from the most painstaking burglar. It required defi- 
nite instruction to find them. How did that detailed 
information get into the consciousness of the two sis- 
ters, sleeping in different houses, at the same time? 

Another dream of discovery presents precisely the 
same principles but differs most interestingly in its 
details. The facts were given to me by Dr. L. H. 
Henley, who was at the time, and still is, chief sur- 
geon of the Texas & Pacific Railway hospital at 
Marshall, Texas. His friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Moore, 
lived on a farm four and a half miles from Atlanta, 
Texas, at the time of the financial panic of 1907. Mr. 
Moore had deposited to his account at his bank about 
five thousand dollars. It will be remembered that 
during that brief financial stringency the banks were 
permitted to limit the amount that could be drawn 
out by depositors and that for some time only a 
small percentage of any balance could be checked out 
within a stated period. This experience of being 
unable to get his money when he wanted it seems to 
have raised a question in the mind of Mr. Moore 
about the wisdom of patronizing banks at all, and 
he evidently resolved that as soon as the restrictions 
had been removed he would withdraw his money 
and put it in a safe place. Just what happened 
between the resumption by the banks of the custom- 
ary rules of procedure and the unexpected death of 
Mr. Moore soon afterward, nobody knows. But when 
his wife went to the bank, in closing up the estate, 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 43 

expecting to find about five thousand dollars to the 
credit of her late husband, she was astounded when 
informed that he had withdrawn the entire sum and 
closed the account. Now that five thousand dollars 
was the total of their little fortune and she faced 
grim poverty alone. She was obliged to abandon the 
home and go to live with a married daughter at 
Texarkana. More than two years passed. She sup- 
posed that her husband had invested or deposited 
the money somewhere, and neglected to mention the 
matter to her, and she could only vaguely hope that 
it would sometime in some way be brought to her 
attention and that she would at last learn the truth. 
She finally did learn the truth, — the strange and im- 
probable truth — and in a most astounding manner. 
She dreamed one night that she was with her husband 
and that he told her the secret of the missing money. 
He had said to her in the dream that he drew the 
money from the bank in gold and silver coin and 
that on a day when nobody but himself was at home 
he had buried the treasure full three feet below the 
surface of the ground, on a line running from a 
certain corner of the house to a certain corner of a 
shed, and exactly midway between the two points. 

So vivid and realistic was the dream that Mrs. 
Moore had absolute confidence that it presented the 
facts; but when she related it to her daughter's hus- 
band and asked him for the money necessary to make 
the journey to the village of Atlanta he ridiculed the 
whole thing so mercilessly that Mrs. Moore began 
to lose her confidence. But again she dreamed of it 



44 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

and again her husband showed her the exact spot of 
the buried coin, urging her to recover it. The repeti- 
tion of the dream, however, did not move the skeptic. 
He declined to furnish money for such an apparently 
absurd investment. But again and again the dream 
recurred and Mrs. Moore could no longer endure the 
suspense. Concealing the purpose of the loan she 
casually asked her son-in-law to lend her five dollars, 
which he readily did. She hurried to the station and 
purchased a ticket for Atlanta. Alighting at the 
village she was fortunate enough to find the old negro 
who had been employed on the farm. He obtained 
a spade and they drove out to the old home. Care- 
fully measuring the distance according to the dream 
directions the exact spot where the money was alleged 
to be secreted was ascertained and the negro began 
to dig. In due time he unearthed the carefully pro- 
tected coin, three feet below the surface. Mrs. Moore 
returned in triumph with nearly five thousand dollars. 
In this interesting case with its happy denouement 
the question naturally arises, "If this dream really 
represented a meeting of the consciousness of the 
dead husband and that of the living wife, why did 
he delay so long about giving the information?" The 
answer is that by the hypothesis the delay was not 
in giving the information but was probably caused 
by the inability of Mrs. Moore to impress it upon her 
physical brain and thereby bring it through into her 
waking consciousness. Apparently only after long 
continued effort did she finally triumph ; but once 
she had succeeded in bringing the memory through 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 45 



into the waking state she was able to repeat it any 
number of times. 

Another case of treasure recovered presents quite 
different circumstances. At the time of the discovery 
of the gold the old miser who had buried it had been 
dead more than seventy years and there was nothing 
that we know of to cause the dreamer to be thinking 
of him, or of a hidden fortune. The story was 
printed January 21, 1908, by the New York World, 
whose reporter went very fully into the details : 

''Miss Lucy Alvord of Taylortown, N. L, told her 
brother Claude on Sunday morning that her grand- 
father, who died in 1837, came to her in a dream the 
night before, appearing so natural that, although she 
had never seen a picture of him. she recognized him 
from her mother's description. Pie was middle-aged 
and wore a beard. In the dream he seemed to shake 
Miss Alvord and arouse her. She stared at him and 
was about to speak, but he indicated silence and 
motioned her to follow him. She followed him into 
the kitchen of the house, a wing that was built long 
before the Revolution. The house itself has been 
occupied by the AJvord family for five generations. 
Stepping to the north side of the great room the man 
opened the iron door orthe brick oven alongside the 
fireplace. He stepped inside the big oven and reap- 
peared with a stone jar which he set on the table 
in the middle of the room. He then seemed oblivious 
to the presence of Miss Alvord, and to her, in the 
dream, his conduct seemed perfectly natural. He dug 
his hands into the crock and brought them out filled 



46 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

with gold pieces. He emptied the crock on the table 
and began to stack and count the money. He made 
separate stacks of English and American coins and of 
the different denominations. He made figures on a 
slip of paper, which he totalled and put in his pocket. 
"Then the visitor put the money back into the 
crock and crawled into the oven. Miss Alvord peered 
in and saw him wall up the crock with bricks and 
mortar. The oven is six feet deep and the wall was 
scarcely noticeable in the great depth. When all had 
been secured the man closed and locked the iron door. 
Then Miss Alvord woke up. When she met her 
brother at breakfast she told him the story. The 
vividness of her dream had frightened her. But she 
insisted that her brother attack the wall of the oven. 
She was confident that he would find the stone crock 
and the treasure. He laughed at her, but to humor 
her went at the wall with a crowbar. The first light 
blow went through the wall. A few blows demol- 
ished it, and there lay a crock such as the woman had 
seen in her dream. The excitement of the sister and 
brother knew no bounds. They dragged out the 
crock and opened it, and before their eyes lay gold. 
They emptied it on the kitchen table — a table made 
generations ago out of a slab of pine. They counted 
the money. In the heap of gold was four thousand 
and some odd dollars. The hoard belonged to Silas 
Alvord, the grandfather, in all probability. He was 
the last of the family to work an iron forge on the 
place. H,e made anchors, anchor chains and other 
implements. When he died, in 1837, it was thought 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 47 

he had a fortune. Apparently, however, he left noth- 
ing but the farm, valuable in itself. Then his relatives 
thought he had lost his money in wildcat banks. Miss 
Alvord's story of the strange dream and of the finding 
of the hoard of gold was told about the countryside, 
and all day yesterday neighbors heard her repeat it 
and looked in the oven and saw where the bricks had 
been removed." 

Still another dream of discovery, resulting in the 
recovery of several thousand dollars in gold coin, is 
reported from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which indi- 
cates that while the physical body is asleep the 
consciousness escapes its material confinement, and 
may bring back to the waking hours information 
which it has acquired in the ethereal regions. The 
following story appeared in the Associated Press 
dispatches sent out from Lancaster June 19, 1916 and 
was widely reprinted throughout the country: 

"When John Bellman, farmer, near Brickerville, 
died six months ago, very little money was found, 
though the widow knew he had a substantial amount. 
In April, William Heil took possession of the farm, 
and he, too, made fruitless searches for Bellman's 
money. Tuesday night he dreamed that Bellman 
came to his bedside ancttold him that the money was 
buried in the hay-mow. Yesterday morning he and 
his wife searched in that place and found a box, deep 
hidden in the hay, and upon opening it, found thou- 
sands of dollars in five, ten and twenty dollar gold 
pieces. The widow of Bellman was notified, and 
took possession of the wealth. Those interested will 



48 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



not tell the amount, but reports have it from $5,000 
to $15,000." 

On September 25, 1909, the New York Evening 
Journal published this : 

"More than five years ago Myra Auld, the half- 
grown daughter of S. M. Auld, living near New Wil- 
mington, Pennsylvania, dreamed that on the farm 
next to that on which her father lived there had been 
buried a pot of gold. She induced her father to buy 
this farm when opportunity offered, and since that 
time she has been searching for the gold which she 
saw in her dreams. To-day her perseverance was 
rewarded when she brought up from the bottom of 
an old, abandoned well on the farm $8,000 in gold, 
which had been buried for evidently twenty years. 
The farm had been owned by James Buchanan, a 
rather eccentric farmer, who died some years since. 
He had the reputation of being a miser and was 
always in great fear of robbers. Some years before 
his death Buchanan told some of his neighbors that 
he had buried some gold where those who did not 
deserve it would not find it. It had evidently been 
the intention of Buchanan to make some mention of 
this in a will which he intended to have written before 
his death, but he died suddenly, and the will which 
he had made some years before stood. The gold 
money was in an old powder can and it was filled 
level full with the gold, and the lid had been roughly 
soldered on and the whole affair wrapped in an old 
gunny sack. Miss Auld declares that she had searched 
every square foot of the farm at least twenty different 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 49 

times in the last five years, and that this was her 
tenth trip into the old well. Some animal had bur- 
rowed in the earth by the can and had exposed part 
of the old sack which enwrapped the can of gold. 
William Hays, administrator of the Buchanan estate, 
admits the finding of the gold and says he will lay 
claim to it in the name of the estate." 

This case is not so strong as the preceding ones, 
but it is worthy a place in the ever-growing catalogue 
of facts which reveal the real nature of human con- 
sciousness. In this case the miser had told some of 
his neighbors that he had buried the gold, presumably 
on his farm, and the skeptical will argue that the 
girl had heard these stories and, believing them, had 
induced her father to purchase the farm. This is 
possible and it reduces the value of the evidence to 
the testimony of Miss Auld. That should be given 
the same weight that it would have in any other 
matter. She asserts that she saw the gold in her 
dreams, but evidently could not definitely locate it, 
and says that because of her dreams she induced her 
father to secure the farm. There seems to be no 
possible motive for telling the dream story unless 
it is true. There was nothing to be gained by it. If 
the tales told by neighbors, of the miser's hidden gold, 
led to the purchase of the farm there appears to be 
no conceivable reason for fabricating the dream story. 
But the case lacks the strength of the preceding ones, 
in which the sequel furnishes overwhelming evidence 
and leaves us with no possible alternative conclusion. 

A case in which a dream was the means of recov- 



50 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

ering the body of a lost son is given in the New 
York American, of October 18, 1915, under the title 
"Mother's Dream Saves Son From Potter's Field." 
The story follows : 

"A mother's graphic dream in which she saw the 
body of her long missing son being lowered into a 
pauper's grave has led to the discovery of the body. 
It marks one of the strangest incidents in local police 
history. Harry Kauffman, of No. 264 Cherry Street, 
disappeared June 30. His body was found July 4 and 
buried the same day among unidentified dead. The 
only record aside from mere description was that 
death had been due to drowning. Last week Mrs. 
Liba Kauffman dreamed all the details of the recovery 
and burial of her son's body. She informed her 
husband. He went to the Bureau of Unidentified 
Dead. The details as made known to his wife in 
the dream tallied in essentials with the actual inci- 
dents connected with the burial of Kauffman's body. 
It was soon learned that the body buried on July 4 
really was that of the missing boy. Orders were then 
given to have it exhumed. Yesterday the funeral was 
held from the Kauffman home." 

In this case about three months pass and the 
mother, who no doubt had been thinking daily of 
her son and mourning for him, at last brings the 
knowledge of the facts into her waking consciousness. 
Many another mother may have had a similar expe- 
rience, and may have longed as earnestly for a clue 
to the mysterious disappearance of her boy, and yet 
failed to get it. One of the world's greatest psycholo- 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 51 

gists, who enjoys the advantage of highly developed 
clairvoyance to facilitate his studies, remarks that 
there is nothing strange about the fact that a very 
small percentage of astral experiences are brought 
through into the waking state, but that the greater 
wonder is that anything at all is brought through on 
account of the fact that in order to do so there must 
be the rare combination of astral, mental and physical 
conditions that make it possible. The factors in- 
volved are, naturally enough, many and varied but 
the degree of sensitiveness represented by the dreamer 
is certainly a most important one. 

Among dreams of discovery one of the most 
dramatic is that connected with the Wilkins case at 
San Francisco in 1908. When the mystery of the 
missing woman could not be explained and^ when, 
with Wilkins in their hands, the officers of the law 
could get no tangible evidence to support the well- 
grounded suspicion that he had killed his wife, a neigh- 
bor came forward with a dream clue. Mrs. Wilkins 
had long before disappeared and her husband had 
given contradictory and improbable explanations of 
her prolonged "visit in the east." But absence and 
suspicion are not evidence and there was an embar- 
rassing halt in the "proceedings. Wilkins would 
undoubtedly have been liberated on account of the 
lack of evidence had not Mrs. Anderson urged the 
authorities to begin excavations in the barn. She 
declared that in repeated dreams she had seen the 
missing woman walk slowly to the barn, where an 
open grave was pointed out. The suggestion of the 



Y 



f2 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

dreamer was finally reluctantly acted upon and the 
dead body was discovered and exhumed. 

. A more recent case in which a dream led to the 
discovery of a crime is reported by the Spokesman Re- 
view, Spokane, Washington, of May 23, 1916. The story 
follows : 

"After a dream in which he saw his son, Dallas 
Greene, who had been missing for nearly a month, 
killed by a man, J. W. Greene, of W. 1002 Seventh 
Avenue, visited Troy, Mont., Saturday, and after a 
search with officers found his son's body buried in a 
dense thicket of brush on Callahan creek, about a 
mile from town. The circumstances indicated that 
murder had been committed, and Jack Miller, with 
whom Greene is said to have been camped near the 
spot of the supposed murder, and who is alleged to 
have sold horses which formerly belonged to Greene, 
was placed under arrest and now is in the jail at 
Libby." 

On July 18, the Missoula Sentinel published a dis- 
patch from Libby, Montana, giving the following addi- 
tional information : 

"John C. Miller, arrested for the murder of Dallas 
A. Greene, was brought before a jury in the district 
court yesterday for trial. The discovery of the mur- 
der came about when W. J. Greene, father of the dead 
man, dreamed he saw his son being killed. Frightened 
by the dream, the father came to this place from 
Spokane, leading the Sheriff to the spot where the 
body was concealed. Miller was arrested while trying 
to sell the deceased's live stock. He told friends that 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 53 

Greene had given him the horses to settle up an old 
debt." 

Whether it transpires that Dallas Greene was 
murdered by Miller, or not, the value of the dream 
remains unchanged. Somebody killed Greene and hid 
the body in the thicket. The young man's father 
dreamed that his son had been murdered and was 
sufficiently impressed by the dream to begin the 
search immediately. 

A case in which it required repeated efforts to 
attain success is related by the Denver Post, of Octo- 
ber 24, 1915. This is the story: 

"A woman's faith in a dream and her adherence 
to injunctions given there by her father may be the 
means of winning a $14,233 law suit for that father's 
former partner and of saving the partner from a jail 
judgment. On successive nights last week Mrs. Carl 
F. Vote, 2531 Stout Street, dreamed that her father, 
Charles F. Leimer, came to talk to her. Mr. Leimer 
died a year ago. The first two dreams were identical. 
In each she told her father exactly how she had 
disposed of her property since he had died, and asked 
his advice. The father attempted to tell her what 
to do — and she woke up. The third night she 
dreamed the same, but did not wake up. Her father 
advised her as to the care of the property, and further 
told her to look in an old trunk in the attic for some 
papers. These he told her to take to his former 
partner, Sylvester Knuttel, a real estate man. The 
next morning she had almost decided not to heed the 
admonition, for she had gone through the trunk many 



54 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

times before and was sure that nothing worth while 
had been left there. But she was convinced from the 
three dreams that the spirit of her father was trying 
to communicate something of importance. She 
looked, found the papers, but did not realize their 
significance until she took them to Knuttel. He was 
overjoyed to receive them, and told her they would 
prove conclusively his title to eight lots in Berkeley 
and some land in Jefferson county, which are the 
basis of a suit by Mrs. Eva May Strong for $14,233. 
Leimer, he said, had been taking care of the papers 
for him, and at his death they were lost. Mrs. Strong, 
who is the daughter-in-law of the late millionaire, 
Samuel Strong, is suing for title to the lots and for 
heavy punitive damages from Knuttel, also demanding 
that Knuttel be sent to jail until any judgment 
returned against him is satisfied." 

This is a case in which there was certainly good 
reason for making strenuous and sustained effort to 
impress upon the mind of the dreamer the where- 
abouts of the missing papers. 

What can the materialistic hypothesis possibly do 
with the facts presented in these dreams of discovery? 
Before the testimony of these witnesses the adherents 
of that outgrown hypothesis stand silent. They can 
neither deny the facts nor explain them. 

A recent writer on the mystery of dreams remarks 
that "dreams locating lost articles may be but drafts 
on the marvelous storehouse of subconscious mem- 
ory/' That would at least be a possible explanation 
where one loses a pocketknife or a key, searches in 



DREAMS OF DISCOVERY 55 

vain for the lost article, and then dreams of its exact 
location. But how can it explain the finding of things 
which the dreamer did not lose, of which there can be, 
neither consciously nor subconsciously, a memory 
record, and of which the dreamer knows nothing 
whatever beyond what he learns from the dream 
state? In at least two of these cases (Reeves Snyder 
and Moore) information unknown to any living being 
is obtained during the hours of sleep, is immediately 
put to the test, and results in the recovery of valua- 
bles. In these two cases alone we have evidence of 
the soundness of the hypothesis laid down in Chapter 
I, which is not merely convincing in its character but is 
also conclusive in its facts. 



CHAPTER IV 

Varieties of Dreams 

While many dreams may be traced to material 
causes there are many others which undoubtedly owe 
their origin to the activities of the ethereal world 
where, functioning in his astral body while the phys- 
ical body sleeps, the dreamer is more or less awake 
to, and conscious of, what is going on about him. 
To people who have thought but little upon such 
subjects there will, at first, be no apparent difference 
between a dream which results from the automatic 
action of the idle physical brain and its etheric coun- 
terpart, and the dream which is the result of astral 
activities, recalled at the moment of awakening. 
Each is but a memory, a mental picture associated 
with various emotions. But there is nevertheless a 
distinction and although it is often slight and elusive 
at first it grows to definiteness with experience. Upon 
first entering a garden filled with a profusion of 
blossoms it is difficult to distinguish between the 
various delicate perfumes but after a little experience 
one is able to separate and recognize the different 
odors. And somewhat thus it is in the subtle regions 
of the dream. What is at first elusive becomes definite 
and unmistakable with experience. 

Every dreamer is aware that there are, broadly 



58 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

speaking, two general classes of memories which he 
calls dreams. In one the dream is more or less 
chaotic, disjointed, illogical and fantastic. Such 
dreams are usually the result of the automatic action 
of the brain. They lack coherence and logic because 
the thinker, the ego, is not there. He has withdrawn 
his consciousness with the separation of the astral 
body from the physical body and is either dreamily 
drifting about in his astral vehicle or is alert to his 
surroundings, according to his stage of evolution. 
The physical body has temporarily lost its tenant as 
certainly as a suit of clothes abandoned before re- 
tiring has lost its occupant. When the ego returns 
to it's tenement of clay and the center of consciousness 
is transferred once more to the physical brain, the 
fragmentary brain pictures become a part of the 
memory. 

These more or less fantastic thought images some- 
times owe their origin in part to external stimuli, and 
the brain, without the directing intelligence of the 
ego, may magnify the pressure of a button into the 
stab of a dagger, or the sound of a rolling marble 
into the roar of artillery. In such dreams the most 
ludicrous situations cause no mirth and the most 
impossible transactions call out no challenge from 
the reason, because no intellect is present to protest 
against the riot of chaos. There is a total absence 
of relationship between cause and effect, while all 
laws of space and matter, have disappeared. The 
dreamer is at one moment walking through the quiet 
country lanes near his home and the next instant 



VARIETIES OF DREAMS 59 

may be seated on the throne of Siam. He changes 
personality with equal facility and may become, in a 
twinkling, one of his neighbors or his own grand- 
father without the slightest suspicion that it is a 
rather remarkable transformation. He may pass 
swiftly from a pleasant chat with a friend to a furious 
quarrel in which his friend changes into a bandit and 
slays him; and, after calmly looking down on his 
own corpse for a moment he rises from the dead, 
drags his murderer into court and gives testimony 
about his own assassination without for a moment 
being aware that there is anything either illogical or 
impossible in the whole affair. 

The other class of dreams differs from all this as 
intelligence differs from stupidity, or mental balance 
differs from insanity. This class of dreams consists 
of either the experiences of the man in the astral 
region while the abandoned physical body is asleep, 
or else of some truth of nature or some premonition 
which the ego attempts, with more or less success, 
to impress upon the physical brain and which is in 
some degree remembered upon awakening. Such 
dreams are akin to the activities of the waking con- 
sciousness in that they are orderly, coherent and 
logical. Different people will recall the events with 
varying degrees of success, some being able to re- 
member only a very little while others review all the 
details with as vivid recollection as the occurrences 
of yesterday's waking hours. But, whether the mem- 
ory grasps little or much, all that is recalled will be 
reasonable and natural. The dreamer remembers 



60 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

that he has been to some place, which may or may 
not be a place that he knows in his waking conscious- 
ness; or he may remember that he has visited some 
friend, whether dead or living matters not, for when 
his living friend is asleep, he, also, is functioning in 
his astral body. The dreamer on awakening may 
sometimes have a memory of a conversation with 
somebody and, if so, it will be a sane and logical con- 
versation, quite as able, or perhaps abler, than any- 
thing he is capable of in his waking state; for in the 
astral realm the center of his consciousness is nearer 
the ego and the thought is therefore a fuller and freer 
expression of himself than it is when expressed 
through the physical brain. This fact explains why 
occasionally some great poem is written, or invention 
is made, or problem is solved, by thought brought 
through into the waking consciousness from the 
sleeping hours. 

It not infrequently happens that one who has 
recently lost a very dear companion or friend remem- 
bers upon awakening to have been with him. If the 
memory is vivid and the event seems realistic there 
is very strong probability that the dream is the 
memory of an astral experience. Quite often the 
dreamer will bring back a memory of the emotions 
aroused by renewed association with the departed, — 
a lingering memory of joy and exaltation. Such 
memories from the ethereal world are, with some 
people, full and complete, while with others they are 
the merest fragments. As a rule the}'- come at widely 
separated periods, and months may elapse between 



VARIETIES OF DREAMS 61 

them. This is not in the least because the association 
is not renewed night after night, for it invariably is, 
but wholly because the dreamer is unable to impress 
the memory of it upon the brain consciousness. It is 
possible to cultivate the ability to do so and slowly 
but steadily to expand the consciousness until one is 
enabled to bring a full and vivid memory of the astral 
activities into the daily life; but a full discussion of 
the details essential to success in the undertaking 
can best be left for a following chapter. 

The dreams that are the result of the automatic 
activity of the physical brain or of vagrant vibrations 
drifting through its etheric counterpart, may be dis- 
missed as being of no importance whatever. It is 
necessary to classify them only to eliminate them. 
The dreams that are memories of the hours spent in 
the ethereal regions may be extremely important to 
one who will take the trouble to understand them 
because they are the activities of his consciousness 
working on higher levels. That higher state of con- 
sciousness is so radically different from its expression 
conditioned by physical matter that it is impossible 
to comprehend it fully, but the fragments of it that 
come through into the Avaking state at least prove its 
almost omniscient character. 

Having eliminated the dreams arising from phys- 
ical causes we may now classify the remainder. These 
may be divided into two classes and be designated 
as dreams that are the memories of astral experiences 
and dreams that are the result of the attempt of the 
ego to impress ideas or facts upon the brain conscious- 



62 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



ness. Dreams of the latter variety are often symbolical 
for, as has been well said, symbology is the language 
of the soul. 

Obviously, facts or ideas impressed on the brain 
consciousness by the ego himself are likely to be of 
the greatest importance. The ideas may represent 
profound truths of nature and the facts may disclose 
the future or contain a warning that it may be ex- 
tremely desirable to fully comprehend. The success 
of the ego's attempt, however, necessarily depends 
upon a number of things and a little thought on the 
subject will suffice to show why failure is common. 
C. W. Leadbeater, in his valuable little volume, 
Dreams, says: 

"A result which follows from the ego's super- 
normal method of time-measurement is that in some 
degree prevision is possible to him. The present, 
the past, and, to a certain extent, the future lie open 
before him if he knows how to read them; and he un- 
doubtedly thus foresees at times events that will be of 
interest or importance to his lower personality, and 
makes more or less successful endeavors to impress 
them upon it. 

"When we take into account the stupendous 
difficulties in his way in the case of an ordinary 
person — the fact that he is himself probably not yet 
even half awake, that he has hardly any control over 
his various vehicles, and cannot, therefore, prevent 
his message from being distorted or altogether over- 
powered by the surgings of desire, by the casual 
thought-currents in the etheric part of his brain, or 



VARIETIES OF DREAMS 63 

by some slight physical disturbance affecting his 
denser body — we shall not wonder that he so rarely 
fully succeeds in his attempt. Once, now and again, 
a complete and perfect forecast of some event is 
vividly brought back from the realms of sleep; far 
more often the picture is distorted or unrecognizable, 
while sometimes all that comes through is a vague 
sense of some impending misfortune, and still more 
frequently nothing at all penetrates the denser body. 

"It has sometimes been argued that when this 
prevision occurs it must be mere coincidence, since 
if events could really be foreseen they must be fore- 
ordained, in which case there can be no free-will for 
man. Man, however, undoubtedly does possess free- 
will; and therefore, as remarked above, prevision is 
possible only to a certain extent. In the affairs of 
the average man it is probably possible to a very 
large extent, since he has developed no will of his 
own worth speaking of, and is consequently very 
largely the creature of circumstances ; his karma 
places him amid certain surroundings, and their action 
upon him is so much the most important factor in his 
history that his future course may be foreseen with 
almost mathematical certainty. 

"When we consider the vast number of events 
which can be but little affected by human action, 
and also the complex and widespreading relation of 
causes to their effects, it will scarcely seem wonderful 
to us that on the plane where the result of all causes 
at present in action is visible, a very large portion of 
the future may be foretold with considerable accuracy 



64 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

even as to detail. That this can be done has been 
proved again and again, not only by prophetic dreams, 
but by the second-sight of the Highlanders and the 
predictions of clairvoyants; and it is on this forecasting 
of effects from the causes already in existence that 
the whole scheme of astrology is based. 

"But when we come to deal with a developed 
individual — a man with knowledge and will — then 
prophecy fails us, for he is no longer the creature of 
circumstances, but to a great extent their master. 
True, the main events of his life are arranged before- 
hand by his past karma; but the way in which he 
will allow them to affect him, the method by which 
he will deal with them, and perhaps triumph over 
them — these are his own, and they cannot be foreseen 
except as probabilities. Such actions of his in their 
turn become causes, and thus chains of effects are 
produced in his life which were not provided for by 
the original arrangement, and, therefore, could not 
have been foretold with any exactitude." 

It is not easy to comprehend in the physical brain 
consciousness how events can be known before they 
occur. May not the explanation be that they have 
occurred so far as inner planes are concerned, but 
that only as they work outward from the realm of 
causation and become materialized in what we call 
an event, can the limited physical consciousness be- 
come aware of them? If physical matter is a limita- 
tion of consciousness it must necessarily give rise to 
illusory ideas of the superphysical realms, where what 
we call past, present and future may represent entirely 



VARIETIES OF DREAMS 65 



different conditions than we are now able to conceive. 
Sir Oliver Lodge says : 

"A luminous and helpful idea is that time is but 
a relative mode of regarding things; we progress 
through phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this 
subjective advance we interpret in an objective man- 
ner, as if events moved necessarily in this order and 
at this rate. But that may be only one mode of 
regarding them. The events may be in some sense 
in existence always, both past and future, and it may 
be we who are arriving at them, not they which are 
happening." 

Whether or not we are able to harmonize our 
conceptions of the matter with the evidence of our 
senses, the evidence still remains. "However strange 
may be the phenomenon of precognition," says Pro- 
fessor Charles Richet, "we must not let ourselves be 
diverted from the truth by the strangeness of appear- 
ances. A fact is a fact, even though it may upset 
our conception of the universe; for our conception of 
the universe is terribly infantile." 

It is scarcely possible to overemphasize the im- 
portance of the fact that people who have premonitory 
dreams represent a very wide range of mental and 
physical conditions and that in the impressions made 
upon the waking consciousness we must naturally 
expect corresponding complexity. Some people are 
prone to assert that since they have had dreams which 
have accurately forecast the future all their succeed- 
ing dreams should prove equally reliable and should 
be regarded as infallible authority. But this by no 



66 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



means follows. Until one has reached that advanced 
point in his evolution where the ego is in control of 
his vehicles of consciousness, and the physical and 
astral bodies have become fairly obedient to the will, 
it is idle to talk of the infallibility of such psychic im- 
pressions. It should be remembered that with the 
average person the memories of both astral experiences 
and egoic impressions are, at best, fragmentary. They 
are limited and very partial expressions of the higher 
consciousness. Such dreams, therefore, are not some- 
thing which, even with fuller understanding and fur- 
ther development, can be used for our guidance in 
the affairs of daily life. They are fragmentary and 
partial, their expression is not within the control of 
the will, and they may at any time be distorted by 
the physical brain conditions of the moment and thus 
be rendered fantastic or ambiguous. This being true 
we cannot positively know the truth or falsity of such 
premonitions until the event they refer to has oc- 
curred. In one instance the event transpires in perfect 
conformity to the dream while in another we find, 
perhaps, that what we expected to happen to ourself 
really befalls a friend, or does not happen to anybody, 
so far as our physical plane knowledge goes. 

The reason for the failure of the premonition may 
be found in one of the foregoing explanations, or in 
still other possibilities as, for example, the fact that 
the waking consciousness has brought through only 
a part of the entire drama, dropping out vital factors 
that would have modified or set aside that which we 



VARIETIES OF DREAMS 67 

remember, and thus we have mistaken a fragment for 
the whole. 

But regardless of the fact that we cannot always 
use such flashes from the ego to shape a course in 
daily life, they are none the less useful and valuable 
in revealing the true nature of our consciousness; 
and although we cannot harness them to rules and 
exceptions they occasionally play an important and 
beneficent part in our lives. Furthermore, by care- 
fully studying them we can arrive finally at a point 
where we can rely upon them because we shall thus 
have hastened the arrival of that period in our evolu- 
tion where the waking and sleeping hours are united 
in unbroken consciousness; where the distorting fac- 
tors in brain transmission will have disappeared and 
the unshadowed wisdom of the ego will come freely 
through into the physical life. 



CHAPTER V 

Premonitory Dreams 

The. ego is the source of most premonitions. The 
dream may be a warning to one's self or may be 
intended for another; or it may convey some informa- 
tion about the future. It may be vivid in detail or it 
may merely leave a very vague impression of impend- 
ing events. But whatever its character and degree of 
efficiency it is usually the result of the effort of the 
ego to convey important information to the waking 
consciousness. 

Premonitory dreams are comparatively rare. They 
usually relate to some very important matter that is 
not far ahead in the physical life of the dreamer, or 
some one closely associated with him; and as such 
events are not numerous the premonitions are corre- 
spondingly few. Naturally enough, accidents and 
death are the subjects with which premonitions fre- 
quently deal. 

There have been mahy notable examples and one 
which will come instantly to mind is Abraham Lin- 
coln's premonition of approaching death. We have 
very definite information on the subject and know 
that he spoke to his bodyguard of the matter the 
evening before the assassination, and made some 
philosophical remarks about death. It is said that 



70 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

he interrupted the last cabinet meeting he ever held 
to speak of a dream and Gideon Welles, Lincoln's 
secretary of the navy, wrote down the details in his diary. 

Lincoln was a great dreamer and appears to have 
attached much importance to what he dreamed. In 
a series of articles entitled Lincoln and Booth, by 
Winfield M. Thompson, which were widely published 
by a newspaper syndicate in 1915, Mr. Thompson 
writes as follows of Lincoln's last dreams : 

"A few days before his death Lincoln related to 
his wife and a few friends the story of a strange 
dream that had disturbed him the night before. In 
his dream, he said, he went from room to room in the 
White House, and everywhere heard sounds of pitiful 
sobbing though no living being was in sight, 'until I 
arrived at the east room. Before me was a catafalque, 
on which rested a corpse. Around it were stationed 
soldiers. There was a throng of people, some gazing 
sorrowfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, 
others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White 
House? I demanded of one of the soldiers.' 

' 'The President/ was his answer. 'Lie was killed 
by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief 
from the crowd, which woke me from my dream.' ,; 

"On the afternoon of Friday, April 14, a few r hours 
before he fell under the assassin's bullet, Lincoln held 
his last cabinet meeting. It was remarkable for two 
things — the depth of charity and love displayed by 
Lincoln in a discussion on the return to the Union of 
the seceded states and a curious vein of mysticism 
the President displayed in describing a premonitory 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 71 

dream he had had the night before. General Grant, 
who had just arrived from Appomattox, was invited 
to attend the meeting and did so. Grant was anxious 
about Sherman, who was confronted by the army of 
General Joseph E. Johnston in the vicinity of Golds- 
boro, N. C., and expressed a desire for news from him. 
The President responded by saying that he thought 
that all was well with Sherman — a dream had caused 
him to feel so. He then described the dream. His 
manner while doing so made a deep impression on 
most of the men about him." 

Gideon Welles' diary gave in extended detail what 
was said about the dream which had reference to the 
approach of important events and which, Lincoln de- 
clared, did not herald success but merely indicated 
that something very important was approaching. The 
record by Secretary Welles runs thus : 

"The president remarked that news would come 
soon and come favorably, he had no doubt, for he had 
last night his usual dream, which had preceded nearly 
every great event of the war. We inquired the par- 
ticulars of this remarkable dream. He said it was in 
my element — it related to the water; that he seemed 
to be in a singular and indescribable vessel, but always 
the same, and that he was moving with great rapidity 
toward a dark and indefinite shore; that he had had 
this same singular dream preceding the firing on 
Sumter and battles of Bull Run, Antietam, Gettys- 
burg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc. 
General Grant remarked with some emphasis and 
asperity that Stone River was no victory — that a few 



72 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

such victories would have ruined the country and 
that he knew of no important results from it. The 
President said that perhaps he should not altogether 
agree with him but whatever might be the facts, his 
singular dream preceded that fight. Victory did not 
always follow his dream but the event and results 
were important. He had no doubt that a battle had 
taken place or was about to be fought 'and Johnston 
will be beaten ; for I had this strange dream again 
last night. It must relate to Sherman; my thoughts 
are in that direction and I know of no other very 
important event which is likely just now to occur/ " 

On March 13, 1915, Col. W. H. Crook, disbursing 
officer of the White House, died at an advanced age, 
after fifty years of continuous government service. It 
was early in 1865 that he became Lincoln's bodyguard. 
His passing revived the stories he used to tell of his 
association with the great statesman and among those 
that appeared with the announcement of his death 
was this testimony about the dream that foretold the 
President's death : 

"Col. Crook told often of how, on the afternoon 
before Lincoln's assassination, the President had 
come to him in confidence and said that on successive 
nights he had dreams which foretold his murder. 
Crook thereupon begged the President not to go to 
the theatre that evening as planned. Lincoln insisted, 
and furthermore would not hear of Crook accompany- 
ing him. He ordered Crook to go home and rest." 

An interesting case of premonition of approaching 
death is that of Dr. I. F. Bacon, of San Francisco. 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 73 

who was killed in the earthquake of 1906. He was 
not able to bring into his waking consciousness any 
of the details but he had been sufficiently impressed 
with the truth of the approaching calamity to have an 
unchangeable conviction that death was just ahead. 
The following account appeared in the San Francisco 
Examiner, May 3, 1906 : 

"For two days before the earthquake Dr. J. F. 
Bacon was haunted by a premonition of sudden 
death. He was killed by the collapse of the house in 
which he lived. Dr. Bacon was well known in San 
Francisco. He was a prominent practitioner, and 
also the proprietor of a drug store at 303 Folsom St. 
Several times during the day immediately preceding 
the disaster he mentioned his fears to his friends. 
Instinctively he felt that a terrible fate was impending 
for him, and while he had no idea what was the nature 
of the threatened accident, he declared that it would 
kill him. To A. W. Vance, a real estate dealer, who 
was graduated from College in Dr. Bacon's class, he 
spoke of the morbid idea which possessed him. 'I 
can't tell what it is,' he said, 'but I know that I will 
meet a sudden death within a day or two. It is im- 
possible to explain.' When the tremblor struck San 
Francisco the house in which Dr. Bacon was sleeping 
at Sixth and Folsom, fell to the ground, burying him 
in the debris. Deceased was a graduate of the class 
of 1876 of the Medical College of the Pacific." 

Two years later another prominent citizen of San 
Francisco died suddenly after a premonition of the 
approaching close of physical life. From the Berkeley 



74 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

Gazette of August 25, 1908, the following account is 
taken : 

''When Eugene Grace, once a leader in the South- 
ern colony and prominent in San Francisco business 
circles, dropped dead while running to catch a train 
in Berkeley Monday evening, it was but the working 
out of a premonition of death he had received twenty- 
four hours before. So strongly was he influenced by 
this innate knowledge of his approaching end that he 
had made a final disposition of his effects and re- 
quested that his body be shipped to his sister in 
Atlanta, Georgia. It was in the Regent Hotel, 562 
Sutter Street, San Francisco, where he lived, that he 
received the inkling of death in the near future. He 
disposed of his property and asked John F. Shea to 
ship his body south. He spoke of his affairs, saying 
that what remained of a life insurance policy of a 
thousand dollars, after the funeral expenses had been 
deducted, should be given to his nephew and name- 
sake in Atlanta. Then, having done all that was 
necessary on this earth, he bravely thrust away the 
subject of death. At one time Grace was a leading 
figure in San Francisco. Courtly, chivalrous, kind- 
hearted, a typical southern gentleman, he was 
immensely popular everywhere." 

In studying the phenomena of premonitions the 
question naturally arises, "Why does the ego impress, 
or try to impress, a warning upon the waking con- 
sciousness?" The reason appears to be plain enough. 
When a physician knows that death must soon come 
to his patient he discloses the truth to him. He never 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 75 

permits death to come suddenly and unexpectedly 
upon him if he can prevent it, but gives him time to 
arrange his affairs and "put his house in order." From 
the purely physical viewpoint there is excellent reason 
for this course. 

If death is inevitable it is clearly much better to 
know it a short time in advance. (To be advised of 
the fact too far in advance of the event would ob- 
viously not be an advantage.) So even if death is 
unavoidable the premonition is of great value. But 
deaths or accidents which are the subjects of pre- 
monitions sometimes are avoidable and have been thus 
escaped. When we remember the difficulties with 
which the ego must deal in impressing the lower mind 
with such warnings it is easy to understand how very 
partial and insufficient most of them must be to the 
brain consciousness. A premonition that is intended 
to be full and vivid in detail may register in the brain 
merely as a vague impression of impending danger, 
Or perhaps as an unshakable conviction of approaching 
death, as in the case of Dr. Bacon, but be utterly 
lacking in details that can lead to a course of action. 
In the case of Eugene B. Grace, above mentioned, 
who can say that deatk might not have been avoided 
if he had known just where the danger lay? Had Dr. 
Bacon known that an earthquake would raze the 
building in which he was accustomed to sleep, would 
he have left the city the day before it occurred? To 
what extent accident and death might be avoided if 
the people who have premonitions were more sensi- 
tive, would be a difficult guess. 



76 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

Cases are not wanting in which the ego appears, 
by repeated and prolonged efforts, to be endeavoring 
to impress the danger of a situation upon the brain 
so firmly that it will be realized in the waking hours. 
This seems to have been the case with Thomas W. 
Ewing, of Pueblo, Colorado, a locomotive engineer 
employed on the Denver and Rio Grande railway, in 
1908. Mr. Ewing's run was westward from Pueblo. 
For several successive nights he dreamed of a terrible 
accident in which he seemed to be killed. So vivid 
and realistic were these dreams that he could not go 
to sleep again after awakening on account of the 
nervous condition they caused. He discussed the 
matter with his wife but, not believing in premoni- 
tions, they decided that overwork or some unknown 
nerve disorder must be responsible for the remarkable 
dreams. On the day following the last of the dreams, 
while his locomotive was standing on a siding at 
Florence, Colorado, the boiler exploded, instantly 
killing both Ewing and his fireman. Had the ego 
been endeavoring to impress upon the lower mind in 
this case the fact that the locomotive was in danger- 
ous condition and picturing the consequences that 
must soon follow if they were not avoided? It seems 
rather remarkable that a dream repeated so per- 
sistently and impressively should have been ignored 
even if details were not brought through into waking 
consciousness. 

A case in which the premonition did serve the 
purpose is that of Mrs. Hugh Larue, of Briceville, 
Tennessee. On December 9, 1911, occurred the dis- 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 77 

astrous explosion in the Cross Mountain coal mine. 
On the next day the New York Herald published the 
following account : 

"After a terrific explosion, that shook the earth 
for a wide area, 207 men were entombed today in 
the Cross Mountain coal mine of the Knoxville Iron 
Company. Hugh Larue, a miner employed in the 
shaft, owes his life to a dream his wife had last night. 
When he arose this morning and prepared to go to 
his daily task Mrs. Larue refused to prepare his 
lunch for him to carry to the mines. She did not 
want him to work today. She then recited a dream 
she had. In her dream she saw scores of miners 
with their heads blown off being carried out of the 
mine entrance as she and her little children stood 
at the mine's mouth. Larue had not missed a day 
from his work for many months, but he was prevailed 
upon to remain out of the mines. It was only a 
short time after Mrs. Larue told her story that the 
explosion occurred." 

A great disaster usually furnishes several examples 
of premonitions. Where several hundred people are 
concerned it may reasonably be expected that a few 
among them are sensitive enough to be impressed 
with the doom that awaits them. The Titanic disaster 
furnished several cases, each possessing more or less 
evidential value, dependent upon circumstances and 
upon whether or not the principals involved men- 
tioned the facts to others prior to the sailing of the 
ship. Among the strong cases is that of the Hon. J. 
Cannon Middleton. The Titanic was scheduled to 



78 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

sail April 10. It appears from the evidence that Mr. 
Middleton purchased his ticket on March 23. A few 
days later he dreamed that the great steamer was 
wrecked and in the dream he saw her surrounded by 
passengers and crew swimming about her. When 
the dream recurred the following night he began to 
feel decidedly uneasy about it but said nothing, prob- 
ably for fear of uselessly alarming his family. For- 
tunately for him a cablegram arrived six days before 
the ship sailed, suggesting a postponement of the 
journey on account of business conditions. Supplied 
now with what seemed to him a tangible reason he 
had his ticket cancelled and then told his wife and 
several friends of the dreams. The books of the 
White Star company and the cancelled ticket, which 
Mr. Middleton retains, furnish part of the evidence. 

Nobody will deny that when there is an elaboration 
of details, coincidence is an impossible explanation. 
If a dream is vague in outline and lacking in detail, 
and later something occurs that corresponds in a 
general way with the dream, we may reasonably 
enough dismiss it as mere coincidence. One dreams, 
let us say, that a fortune is inherited and soon after 
a relative dies bequeathing property to the dreamer; 
or one dreams of being seriously injured and later 
has an arm broken in a railway wreck. While such 
dreams may, or may not, be actually connected with 
the succeeding events, coincidence is a possible ex- 
planation. But when the dream presents a wealth of 
details, and the following event corresponds exactly, 
then coincidence is an absurd and impossible explana- 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 79 

tion. It is coincidence that Mr. A., in Chicago, is 
telling an amusing story of a man whom he once 
saw under hypnotic influence, at the same time that 
Mr. B., in St. Louis, is making himself ludicrous in 
a series of hypnotic antics. But it is impossible that 
every word and gesture and facial expression of Mr. 
B. and the man of whom Mr. A. speaks can be 
identical. Coincidence can explain the concurrence of 
two general events but never an identity of details. 
Now, it is impossible to deny that dreams sometimes 
forecast the, minutest details. An acquaintance gives 
me the following personal experience but without 
permission to use her name. 

"I rarely dream, but several weeks before my 
husband passed on I dreamed of his death. I seemed 
to be taken into our living room where the casket 
was placed and saw him surrounded by floral pieces 
bearing the customary cards. As my husband was 
a splendid type of physical strength and had never 
been ill, except for an occasional cold, the dream 
made little impression upon me. I had no confidence 
in the reality of any kind of dreams and, after casually 
mentioning it to an intimate friend, I thought no 
more about it. Some weeks later my husband con- 
tracted pneumonia and died suddenly. My dream 
came vividly before rne then, for every floral piece, 
every card, and the arrangement of the room, was 
identical with the dream." 

Every student of psychology is familiar with the 
fact that dreams are very commonly expressed in 
symbology. It is the method of the ego, apparently, 



80 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

and it is definitely expressive of the^ ideas to be im- 
pressed upon the lower mind. Attention has already 
been directed to the fact that the inner planes are 
nearer to reality than the physical life. This symbol- 
ical language of the soul illustrates the point. As 
symbols are to words, the higher consciousness is to 
the lower. A story that would require a thousand of 
our clumsy words for its presentation may be ex- 
pressed very briefly by symbols. But it must not be 
supposed that because a dream is symbolical it is, 
therefore, an accurate description and presents the 
facts with invariable certainty. Its reliability depends, 
as with any dream, upon the clearness of the transla- 
tion in the lower mind and the freedom from confusion 
with the vibrations of the dense brain and its etheric 
counterpart. 

Sometimes people who are interested in the study 
of dreams ask if there is some code in symbology 
which, when understood, will enable one to compre- 
hend a dream expressed in symbols. The fact seems 
to be that symbols convey different meanings to 
different people and that each person who dreams in 
that fashion attaches to the symbols a significance of 
his own. He has, however, not the least doubt about 
the meaning of any particular symbol, and probably 
for the reason that the ego impresses its special 
significance as everything else is impressed. One 
person associates success, or an "all's well" feeling, 
with the symbol of a flag; another with flowers; one 
knows that dark water signifies danger, while another 
sees an animal or a reptile as the symbol of impending 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 81 

danger or misfortune. Is it not probable that the ego 
uses, for expressing facts to the lower consciousness, 
the symbols which that particular person can best 
understand? If one has a fear of water that would 
be the line of least resistance in impressing the idea 
of coming calamity. Another may feel perfectly at 
ease when about, or in, the water but may be rilled 
with apprehension at sight of a mouse or a spider. 
In that case the symbol of water would convey no 
warning, and serve no purpose in arousing and 
steadying the personality against a coming shock, 
while the symbol of the animal or the insect would. 
Therefore the meaning of the symbol varies with the 
temperament and experience of the individual. 

A good illustration of the symbolical dream., in 
which the ego is first endeavoring to warn and fortify 
the lower mind against approaching trouble and later 
to impress the encouraging fact that the danger has 
passed, is contained in three dreams related to me 
by Mrs. Robert K. Walton, of NordhorT, California. 

In the early part of January, 1915, she dreamed 
that while with her husband a dangling black spider 
appeared and that both of them began to fight it. 
Mrs. Walton had not beeri in really good health for 
several years but at the time of the dream fehe was in 
her usual health except for a slight fever which was 
thought to be the result of a trifling indisposition. 
Nothing was farther from her mind than the thought 
that the fever indicated anything serious. In the 
dream she felt that the spider must be killed. Instead, 
however, it disappeared. The scene suddenly changed 



S2 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

and she found herself in a new, clean room, such as 
spiders are not likely to inhabit, and she experienced 
a feeling of relief. But suddenly she became aware 
that instead of having left her when it disappeared, 
the loathsome insect was now beneath her clothing! 

This dream Mrs. Walton related to her husband 
in the morning. A few days passed and as the slight 
fever did not leave her a physician was called in. 
He announced at once that her condition was such 
that she must go to a hospital the following day. It 
proved to be the beginning of an illness which con- 
tinued several months. She had not been long in the 
hospital when a large abscess formed and, in due 
course, was lanced. This, and her general condition, 
gave weeks of pain and marked a distinct stage in 
her long illness. The doctor and nurse cheered her 
up with hopeful talk and she was looking forward 
to early recovery when the second dream occurred. 

It was now the latter part of May. Mrs. Walton 
dreamed that she was in a garret and that in passing 
out of the door she put her hand in a spider's web. 
An enormous, vicious looking spider ran up her wrist, 
filling her with a feeling of horror. She awoke gasp- 
ing with terror. This dream was related to the nurse 
with the prediction that it portended great trouble. 
The nurse made light of the matter, as nurses always 
do. But a few days later the doctor gently announced 
to the patient that a capital operation was necessary. 
It followed, and for some weeks she was a pawn in 
the game played by life and death. Life finally won 
and she arose and went out into the world again. 



PREMONITORY DREAMS S3 

But meantime a third dream had cheered her with its 
forecast of the truth, and no doubt helped in her 
recovery, as the others had helped to fortify her 
against approaching trouble. 

It was only two or three days after the operation 
that the third dream occurred. Mrs. Walton dreamed 
that she was sitting in an arbor talking with her sur- 
geon, not her physician. The surgeon looked about 
him. Overhead was an enormous spider. He pulled it 
down and flung it into a fire where it was consumed by 
the flames. It was the operation, notwithstanding its 
great danger, that finally closed the chapter of suffer- 
ing and now for the first time in fourteen years she 
is enjoying good health. This series of dreams is, I 
am inclined to think, one of the most interesting on 
record. A little careful study of its details will reveal 
to the student of dream lore a better understanding of 
the watchfulness of the ego over the personality, and 
will indicate the extent to which helpful impressions 
would be received by everybody if they were more 
sensitive to them. 

While the more tragic things of life are usually 
the subjects of premonitions there are, of course, ex- 
ceptions to the rule. Sometimes, when apparently the 
astro-physical conditions are most favorable, common- 
place things may be impressed on the brain and be 
clearly retained in the waking memory. It may occa- 
sionally descend from the commonplace even to the 
trivial. But instances in which only the ordinary 
drama of life, and that at least devoid of tragedy for 
the dreamer himself, is outlined in its immediate 



84 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

future, are fairly common. A case of this kind oc- 
curred recently in an eastern city. In June, 1916, a 
lady residing near me received a letter from Robert 
Donovan, of Brooklyn, N. Y., describing a premoni- 
tory dream. Mr. Donovan has an intimate friend 
whose profession is teaching. His family consisted of 
his elderly parents and a sister. The sister did the 
housekeeping and looked after the parents during the 
absence of her brother, who went daily to his school. 
He was expecting to be married in the near future 
and this was well known to his friends. One night in 
March, 1916, Mr. Donovan dreamed that he was in 
conversation with his friend, the teacher, who told 
him that he would be married on May 20. In his 
dream Mr. Donovan glanced at the calendar and, 
observing that May 20th came on Saturday remarked 
that it was an unusual day for a wedding. "Why 
don't you wait till the school term has closed?" he 
asked his friend. The teacher replied that he could 
not do so but if he gave any reason the dreamer 
could not remember it. In the morning he related 
his dream to his mother who laughed at its improba- 
bility. Two weeks later the teacher's sister fell dead, 
and a difficult situation presented itself. There was 
nobody to stay with the parents while the teacher 
was absent. In this emergency the date of the mar- 
riage was advanced and the teacher wrote Mr. 
Donovan that, as the result of the unexpected develop- 
ments, and of his professional engagements, the 
wedding would take place on Saturday, May 20. 



PREMONITORY DREAMS 85 

While the ego is undoubtedly responsible for most 
of the premonitory dreams there are apparently cases 
in which the forecast of the future may be communi- 
cated by some entity of the ethereal regions. There 
are also on record some cases which appear to indicate 
that when the ego is unable to impress the lower mind 
the information is indirectly conveyed through an- 
other person who can be impressed ; and it would 
appear that this sometimes occurs when there is 
nothing more important to be revealed than an im- 
pending set of circumstances which may cause dis- 
appointment and great annoyance, the distress of 
which may be somewhat softened by the knowledge 
that it is inevitable. 

Much has been written about dreams which have 
enabled students to find the solution of perplexing 
mathematical or other problems. Many stories are 
told of inventions, poems and musical compositions 
coming from the dream state and being written out 
immediately upon awakening. By our hypothesis the 
explanation may be either that the dreamer gets the 
ideas from his own less restricted consciousness in 
higher realms, or that he gets them from others whom 
he meets in the astral regions and, in either case, is 
fortunate enough to retain the memory when he 
awakens. 

Robert Louis Stevenson, who appears to have 
known very much about the occult, tells us in Travels 
and Essays that the most original of his stories were 
sketched or composed in dreams — that he not only 
thus got perfect plots but saw it all dramatized. The 



86 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

dream state was apparently his final resort when the 
waking consciousness could not supply the necessary 
material. He had long tried, he says, to write some- 
thing on dual personality, but in vain. Then he 
dreamed the essentials of The Strange Case of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And this was only an incident 
in many years of similar work. Olalla was "given" 
to him, he asserts, "in bulk and detail." He says that 
he merely added the external scenery and that the 
moral itself, of the story, came in the dream. 

In what degree the ego, with marvelous grasp of 
the verities of nature, might illuminate the lower 
mind, and to what extent premonitions would warn us 
and guide us if we were all highly sensitive, and re- 
sponsive to the delicate vibrations sent down into 
the physical brain, it is impossible to guess. The 
evidence furnished by the many well authenticated 
cases of premonitory dreams certainly indicates that 
the ego is continually endeavoring to impress ideas 
and facts upon the lower mind, but usually with no 
very great success. 



CHAPTER VI 

Memories of Astral 
Experiences 

Excluding the trivial and fantastic dreams — those 
which are automatically produced by the physical 
mechanism of consciousness — by far the larger part of 
the remainder are the memories of astral experiences. 
Premonitions and also the dream — if it may properly 
be called a dream — in which the lower mind is im- 
pressed with some truth of nature not previously 
understood, naturally constitute a very small propor- 
tion of dream activities. Dreams which are the memo- 
ries of what one has seen and heard and said and 
done in the astral consciousness during the time when 
the physical body sleeps are greater in number be- 
cause they represent the ordinary affairs of life. Such 
dreams may come to any person who has attained that 
point in human evolution where the mind and emo- 
tions are fairly well controlled. The conditions are 
then present that render a recollection of the astral 
experiences at least possible, but it must not be for- 
gotten that there must be a necessary combination of 
physical, astral and mental relationships that permit 
the vibrations of the astral matter to register them- 
selves in the physical brain. It therefore commonly 
happens to the person who has reached the stage 



88 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



in 



where he is conscious and active in the astral real 
at night that he only occasionally recalls the experi- 
ences through Avhich he has passed. AVhen he attains 
this stage of his evolution, however, he will seldom, if 
ever, experience the old order of confused dream due 
to the senseless automatic activity of the physical 
brain. On the contrary, he will very probably have 
no dream memories at all upon awakening in the 
morning, except upon the infrequent occasions when 
he brings through a recollection of the astral experi- 
ences. The frequency of this increases as his evolu- 
tion proceeds, and he ultimately remembers all the 
astral experiences — a gratifying result that can be 
greatly hastened by giving studious attention to the 
matter. 

If we put aside the effort from the material side to 
bring back the memory and consider the matter in its 
relationship to the average person, then we may say 
that in premonitions we have a class of dreams that 
represents the direct efforts of the ego to impress the 
lower mind, while in dreams that are the results of 
astral experiences we have the memories which float 
through simply because, so to speak, all the interven- 
ing gates happen to be open at the same instant. 

As more and more facts about dreams are col- 
lected the hypothesis here invoked to explain them 
will become stronger. Occasionally somebody has a 
unique dream that throws new light on the true nature 
of the dream state. In his lecture on Shakespeare (p. 
45), Robert G. Ingersoll relates the following dream: 

"I once had a dream, and in this dream I was dis- 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCE 89 

cussing a subject with another man. It occurred to 
me that I was dreaming, and I then said to myself: 
If this is a dream I am doing the talking for both 
sides — consequently I ought to know in advance what 
the. other man is going to say. In my dream I tried 
the experiment. I then asked the other man a ques- 
tion, and before he answered made up my mind what 
the answer was to be. To my surprise the man did 
not say what I expected he would, and so great was 
my astonishment that I awoke." 

What Col. Ingersoll remembered as a dream was 
probably an actual conversation. Had he been famil- 
iar with the idea that while the physical body sleeps 
the consciousness functions through a subtler body, 
he could not have been surprised at the actual conver- 
sation in which the other man furnished his own ideas 
as he would do in the physical body. His memory of 
the incident on awakening was evidently a confused 
blending of the astral experience and his physical 
ideas of what dreams are. 

In Chapter I the difference between sleep and 
death was discussed, and the freedom of the soul, or 
consciousness, in etherial realms while the physical 
body sleeps was pointed out. Since the relationship 
of physical and astral matter is that of interpenetra- 
tion, as in the case of a sponge surrounded by water 
which both envelops it and permeates it, passing into 
the astral region is not necessarily a journey in space. 
But it may mean that, and may represent movement 
of the astral body that is extraordinarily rapid as com- 
pared with anything of which we know in the physical 



96 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

world. But however far afield one may journey in the 
astral body there remains a magnetic connection with 
the physical body. Clairvoyant investigations reveal 
the fact that in the case of people of low evolutionary 
development the astral body remains during sleep in 
the immediate vicinity of the physical body, while 
with the person of average mental and moral develop- 
ment it moves freely through the astral regions as 
the vehicle of his consciousness. The experiences 
gained naturally present great variety. 

Mrs. Ella R. Tuttle, of Rochester, N. Y., furnishes 
two dreams in which the accuracy of the waking 
memory was promptly sustained by physical facts. 
In 1898 she dreamed that her mother, who was dead, 
came to her as a messenger asking assistance for a 
sick relative who lived about thirty miles away. She 
said, "Aunt Mary is very ill and needs you at once. 
Your father will send you a telegram tomorrow noon 
and you must go to her." 

Mrs. Tuttle evidently accompanied her mother to 
the home of the sick relative. She saw her aunt lying 
in bed and observed that it was covered with a quilt 
having a certain peculiar pattern. She awoke; but 
had, of course, no means of immediately verifying the 
dream. About two o'clock on the afternoon of the 
following day she did receive a telegram from her 
father conveying the information that her aunt was 
ill, and requesting her immediate presence. She went, 
and found her aunt, Mrs. Mary Tinklepaugh, of Sodus, 
N. Y., very much in need of her assistance, as only a 
young and inexperienced girl was in charge. Upon 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 91 

entering the sickroom the visitor observed upon the 
bed a quilt with the pattern she had seen in her 
dream. 

At a much later date Mrs. Tuttle was interested 
in the project of beautifying the grounds of an estate 
belonging to a society of which she was a member: 
Reading in a magazine an announcement that con- 
tributions to a tree-planting fund would be received 
she wrote a letter, enclosing a donation and addressed 
it to Mrs. R., an officer of the society, but did not 
get the letter in the mail that evening. That night 
she dreamed that she visited the estate, over two 
thousand miles distant, and saw and conversed with 
several people there. One of them called her atten- 
tion to the fact that she had addressed the letter to 
the wrong person, and that if it went to Mrs. R. the 
money would go into a fund to be used for a totally 
different purpose. It should, her informant said, be 
addressed to Mr. W. But the dreamer was not con- 
vinced and argued the point. The conversation closed 
with this advice: "Look again in the magazine and 
you will see your mistake." In the morning Mrs. 
Tuttle related her dream to her daughters, and the 
magazine was looked up. Examination showed that 
she had been in error in addressing the donation to 
Mrs. R. and that the dream information was correct. 
The letter was re-written and properly addressed. 

The dream terror of murderers is well known. If 
our hypothesis is sound the reason is simple, for sleep 
would again bring the murderer face to face with his 
victim for the time being. If the murderer be one 



92 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

sensitive enough for the impression to register in 
the physical brain the experience would be remem- 
bered on awakening. If he be less sensitive he might 
only have a vague sensation of terror instead of the 
vivid memory of details, as Macbeth apparently did 
when he referred to "these terrible dreams that shake 
us nightly." If the murderer be of a very unimpres- 
sionable type he would probably be quite undisturbed 
by anything except physical plane affairs and the fear 
of legal consequences. 

From Providence, R. I., a case is reported in which 
the dream agony of a murderer led to his arrest. 
Henry Kelly, seventy years old, was found murdered. 
The police searched systematically for the perpetrator 
of the crime but, being unable to find a single clue 
to the mystery, the case was finally abandoned. Mean- 
time the murderer's remembered astral experiences 
were so completely destroying his peace of mind that 
confession was inevitable. One day Frank T. Lyons, 
twenty-two years old, walked into the police head- 
quarters and surrendered to the authorities. A Provi- 
dence reporter quotes the self-accused murderer as fol- 
lows: 

"I was haunted by his ghost, and I had to con- 
fess. I killed him, though I didn't mean to. Then I 
went to my room, but I couldn't sleep. I had strange 
dreams, and in them I saw the old man coming 
toward me. He seemed to be lame, and to be coming 
toward me all the time, as if he wanted to say some- 
thing to me. I couldn't stand it any longer. I fully 
understand the meaning of this to me. I suppose that 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 93 

it means I will be electrocuted or hanged, but I can't 
help it. I simply had to tell." 

Just how great was the horror created by the 
"strange dreams" only those who have been able to 
bring into the waking consciousness astral impres- 
sions of the undesirable sort will be able to compre- 
hend. They must, indeed, have been terrible to lead 
to a confession that might forfeit life, and the sentence 
"I couldn't stand it any longer" indicates that the 
limit of human endurance had been reached. 

The vivid reality of an astral experience at the 
moment it comes through into the waking conscious- 
ness is such that the just-awakened dreamer some- 
times has difficulty, for a moment, in believing that 
he has not seen the event with the physical eyes. An 
interesting example of this is reported from Stock- 
holm. It would be well worth while to have the 
sequel to the story, but it was not possible to follow 
it up for further details. A press despatch sent out 
from Stockholm under date of September 29, 1915, 
tells the story: 

"The identification of a murderer by a man who 
never saw the prisoner, but who claims to have seen 
the murder committed in a dream, will be attempted 
by the local police department just as soon as General 
Bjorn, who is now critically ill in the west of Sweden, 
is strong enough to look at the photographs of the 
anarchist who assassinated his friend General Beck- 
man, on the night of June 26. At the very hour that 
the crime was committed, but many miles from the 
scene of it, General Bjorn, raving in delirium, saw 



94 DKEAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



in a fever-inspired vison his old friend shot down in 
a street in Stockholm. Suddenly he shouted: 'Drop 
that, you scoundrel/ Then : 'The shots are explod- 
ing/ When the nurse sought to calm him he became 
angry and tried to spring out of bed. 'Can't you 
hear?' he cried. 'Can't you see the smoke? They 
have murdered General Beckman. Don't you see the 
blood on the street?' He raved all night, but at day- 
break grew calmer and slept an hour. When he 
woke he said: 'You will find that General Beckman 
has been murdered. I am sure of it.' He even de- 
scribed the crime in detail. At 9 o'clock the papers 
arrived telling of the assassination of General Beck- 
man." 

Another case in which the details of what is occur- 
ing elsewhere are vividly remembered is reported in 
the Daily Telegram, of Portland, Oregon, of July 2, 
1916: 

"As he lay dreaming that his brother was dying 
and that he was vainly trying to restore him, M. E. 
Lillis, member of the Portland Police Bureau, was 
awakened by the persistent ringing of the telephone 
in his home, 565 Hoyt street, this morning. When he 
awoke and answered, the word came over the wire 
that his brother, William P. Lillis, special agent of 
the Portland Railway, Light and Power Company, 
had died unexpectedly at Seaside at an early hour. 
When Lillis left for his vacation at Seaside about a 
week ago, he was in excellent health, although his 
constitution had been somewhat weakened by a severe 
attack of la grippe. It is believed that heart trouble 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 95 

due to the grippe was the cause of death. The body 
will be shipped to Portland today and funeral ar- 
rangements will be made this afternoon." 

Three dreams by three people on the same night, 
and presenting the same details in practically the same 
language, led to the famous Sutton investigation case 
at Annapolis. The first chapter of the story is told 
in a press dispatch from Portland, Oregon, the home 
of the ill-fated lieutenant's parents, under date of 
August 11, 1909. It reads: 

'Two nights after the tragic death at Annapolis 
of Lieutenant James M. Sutton, of the United States 
Marine Corps, each of three women had a dream in 
which the young man appeared before them and in- 
formed them that he had been murdered. 'The son 
of a gun sneaked up behind me and struck me on the 
back of the head. The first I knew that I had been 
shot was when I woke up in eternity.' That is the 
exact language used by the boy in the dream as he 
stood before each woman. The persons to whom the 
young man appeared in dream form are Mrs. J. N. 
Sutton, his mother, at the family residence in Port- 
land; Mrs. Margaret S. Ainsworth, his aunt, on her 
farm in Wasco Co., Oregon, and Miss Rose Sutton, 
his sister, who was then on an Oregon Short Line 
train speeding to Annapolis. Each woman had the 
dream Tuesday night, October 15, 1907. Young Sut- 
ton died about one o'clock Sunday morning, October 
13, 1907." 

With this triple corroboration the mother of the 
dead lieutenant determined to clear her son's name 



96 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 



of the suicide charge. Nearly two years passed before 
she finally had the satisfaction of appearing before 
the court of inquiry and hearing Dr. Edward M. 
Shaffer, formerly coroner in the city of Washington, 
testify that in his opinion as an expert it was quite 
impossible that Lieutenant Sutton could have fired 
into his own head the bullet that killed him. After 
the first dream, and before the official inquiry was 
held, the mother had other dreams. To a reporter 
for the San Francisco Examiner, on the eve of the 
opening of the inquiry August 9, 1909, she said that 
her dead son had said to her : 

" 'Mother, dear, don't you believe it. I never killed 
myself. They beat me to death and then shot me to 
hide the crime.' He told me how they laid the trap 
for him, how he walked into it, how one of them 
grabbed him to pull him out of the automobile, how 
they held him and beat him ; about his forehead being 
broken; his teeth knocked out, and the lump under 
his jaw, and how when he was lying on the ground 
someone kicked him in the side and smashed, his 
watch. He begged me to live to clear his name. 
Well, after three weeks I proved some things he told 
me were true, and after repeatedly demanding the 
evidence, I got it and within the last month I have 
proved everything he told me." 

An instance in which medical aid was given on 
account of a dream was told me by Dr. J. S. Devries, 
now residing at Fremont, Nebraska. In the year 
of 1898 he was practicing his profession in Fontenelle, 
Nebraska, and had among his patients the little daugh- 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 97 

ter of Henry Hue, a farmer residing several miles 
from the town. The doctor, hard driven by a large 
practice, came home one evening, and retired much 
exhausted. He had seen his little patient at noon 
the previous day, and was intending to call again at 
the same hour on the following day. After sleeping 
a short time he awoke with an uncertain memory of 
imminent danger to the little girl, who was afflicted 
with scarlet fever. While the details were not clear, 
his apprehension was great, and he felt an irresistible 
impulse to go to her immediately. Notwithstanding 
his physical exhaustion, and the complete absence of 
any tangible evidence that he was needed, he never- 
theless ordered his carriage out and drove rapidly to 
the farmer's home. He arrived at midnight and found 
the household in commotion, the child exhibiting 
alarming symptoms, and a messenger just ready to 
leave to summon him. 

Attention has already been called to the fact that 
one whose physical body is asleep may, in his astral 
body, visit places at a distance. If his friends are 
asleep at the same time he may be with them astrally 
although their sleeping physical bodies may be hun- 
dreds of miles apart. v If he is asleep, and they are 
awake he may visit them but could not communicate 
with them unless they were clairaudient or unless 
there, were some other method for the interchange of 
intelligence, such as the planchette, and the waking 
friend or friends were sufficiently responsive to operate 
it. A case that illustrates the principles here involved 
came to my attention soon after its occurrence. A 



98 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

party of six persons, live of whom were my personal 
friends, were chatting together at the Ansonia Hotel, 
New York, one evening in June, 1914. The conversa- 
tion turned to the subject of getting communications 
from the living by automatic writing. One of the 
party had had some success in that line, and pencil 
and paper were procured. Mr. S. thought of Mrs. T., 
who had sailed for England three days previously, 
and would therefore be somewhere in mid-ocean. It 
was then about 10:30 p. m. in New York, and would 
be well into the night in Mrs. T.'s longitude, and she 
would presumably be asleep. The group of experi- 
menters got a message about the voyage, and then 
Mrs. B said to the invisible visitor : "Will you try 
to remember this experience and put it in a letter to 
Mr. S. in the morning?" The response, slowly spelled 
out, was, "I will. Sorry, I have to leave you." About 
twelve days later Mr. S. received a letter from Mrs. 
T. Avhich had been written at sea, and was dated on 
the morning following the experiment. Mrs. T. wrote : 

"I had a queer experience last night. I suddenly 
awoke about 2 a. m. The door of my cabin had 
blown open and was banging. / remembered distinctly 
of being zvith you in a circle of people:" 

Kvidently Mrs. T. could not recall the details of 
her astral visit. She had no memory of her promise 
to write a letter about it, but she did remember being 
with Mr. S. in a circle of people, and this was so 
unexpected and perplexing that she called it "a queer 
experience," and felt impelled to write about it. Mr. 
S. adds that a careful calculation of the variation in 



i 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 99 

time indicates that the hour mentioned by Mrs. T. 
corresponded with the meeting in New York. 

An interesting case of bringing very clearly into 
the waking consciousness what is transpiring at a dis- 
tance is a dream of Dr. L. H. Henley, chief surgeon 
of the Texas and Pacific Railway hospital at Marshall, 
Texas, who sends me an affidavit with the following 
story : 

"On the morning of January 8, 1910, I awoke 
about 3 o'clock from a dream about my sister, Mrs. 
Henry W. Parker, who was living in Randolph Co., 
N. C. I had not heard from her for some time. I said 
to my wife, 'Sister Lou is dying — literally choking 
to death.' Mrs. Henley spoke lightly and reassuringly 
of the matter. I wrote at once to my sister, inquiring 
about her health. The following day I received a let- 
ter from her that had been written January 7, only 
a day before my dream occurred, saying that all were 
well except for severe colds. I showed this letter 
to my wife, who warned me about being too hasty 
in telling my dreams! Again at about 3 a. m., Janu- 
ary 10, I awakened, and told Mrs. Henley that my 
sister was dying, sitting in a willow rocking chair, 
and that her husband^ Henry W. Parker, was near 
death in the adjoining room. This announcement 
after the very recent letter asserting that the family 
was well, with the exception of bad colds, led mj' wife 
to make some facetious remarks about my sanity. 

"No reply ever came to my letter of inquiry, but at 
10 a. m., January 16, I received the following tele- 
gram: 'Asheboro, N. C, January 15. Dr. L. H. 



100 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

Henley, Marshall, Texas. Your sister Lou died Friday 
and was buried. Henry Parker, her husband, died 
today. Three children sick and cannot recover. Pneu- 
monia. Come. — Levi V. Lowe.' 

"Mr. H. E. Lewis, money order clerk in the post 
office, Mr. H. E. Behymer and Mrs. Henley were 
present when the telegram arrived. They had just 
been joking me about my alarm founded on a dream. 
I silently handed the telegram about to my friends. 
I felt quite as certain that the children would not die 
as I had felt the sad truth about their parents. Later 
the dream details about my sister's death were verified. 
The children recovered, and are now living at Edora, 
Kansas, the two elder ones being Mr. Lindley Parker 
and Miss Mary Parker." 

These dreams have the element of prevision. One 
of the dreams occurred five days and the other three 
days before the death of Mrs. Parker, and each of 
them gave some of the details of her death, as well as 
the fact that Mr. Parker was near death. 

The Messina earthquake, like all great disasters, 
furnished a number of interesting cases, and one of 
the best attested was that of the young sailor whose 
dream revealed to him the spot where his fiance was 
imprisoned in the ruins, although the most diligent 
search in his waking consciousness had been unavail- 
ing. A press dispatch told the story thus: 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 101 

"A curious case of rescue was that in which a 
sailor on board the Italian battleship Regina Elana 
found his sweetheart. He was granted leave to search 
for the girl in Messina, with whom he was engaged 
to be married. After having sought for her in vain 
for four days in the ruins he returned to the ship ex- 
hausted and fell asleep. He dreamed that his fiance 
said to him, 'I am alive. Come, save me.' On awaken- 
ing he obtained fresh leave from the commander of 
the ship, gathered together several friends, and went 
to the spot of which he had dreamed. The party pried 
apart the ruins of a house and found the girl unin- 
jured." 

If he searched four days in vain he could not have 
had any particular place in mind where he expected 
to find her. Yet when he succeeded in bringing the 
memory of the sleeping hours through into waking 
consciousness he went immediately to the place where 
she was imprisoned by the ruins. He not only remem- 
bered conversing with the girl, but he evidently had 
a clear memory of the locality, which enabled him 
to go to it. The telepathic theorists will hardly ven- 
ture to argue that he got in telepathic touch with the 
landscape! Only the hypothesis that the conscious- 
ness is functioning in the astral vehicle while the 
physical body is asleep seems to furnish a satisfactory 
explanation. 



102 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

Another case which was widely published also tells 
the story of a life-saving mission, but under very dif- 
ferent circumstances. It occurred in April, 1912, and 
is given as follows in the press dispatches from At- 
lanta, Georgia : 

"Awakened from a sleep in which he had dreamed 
that a nearby railway trestle on the Southern Railroad 
had been w r ashed away, O. T. Kitchens, a section fore- 
man, although suffering from illness, arose from his 
bed and w^ent to South River, six miles from here, 
before dawn yesterday, and found that his dream was 
a reality. The stream, swollen by heavy rains, had 
carried away a trestle spanning a sixty-five foot 
chasm. He knew that a passenger train was soon due to 
arrive at the opposite side of the river, but had no 
means of reaching that point to warn the engine 
driver of the danger, and the river is three-quarters 
of a mile wide. Standing on jthe bank Kitchens put 
his hands to his lips and repeatedly shouted for half 
an hour. Finally he heard an answering shout, and 
he called out a warning to J. E, Daniel. Daniel 
flagged the train as it neared the brink of the stream." 

How can the advocates of the materialistic hypoth- 
esis possibly explain this? In the Messina case there 
was the possibility of explaining a part of what oc- 
curred by telepathic communication, but in the 
Kitchens' dream there is no chance whatever of lug- 



MEMORIES OF ASTRAL EXPERIENCES 103 

ging in telepathy. In the other case somebody knew 
of at least a part of the facts necessary for the rescue. 
But here we have a case of a bridge suddenly giving 
way and imperiling the lives of a trainload of people 
who knew nothing of the danger that confronted 
them. Not a human being knew of the collapse of 
the bridge, not even Daniels, who lived nearby. It 
was late in the night, towards dawn, and the inhabit- 
ants of the countryside were sleeping. Telepathy is 
absolutely out of the case. There was nobody whose 
mind contained the information. Kitchens' dream 
must have been an impelling one. He was ill, and 
the night was stormy, but in spite of the difficulties 
in the way his dream resulted in stopping the train, 
and very probably in saving many lives. 



CHAPTER VII 

How to Remember Dreams 

For the same reason that it is possible to evolve 
into higher development any faculty or quality which 
we possess it is also possible to cultivate the art of 
bringing the memory of our experiences during sleep 
through into the waking consciousness. But it is of 
little use for one to attempt it unless one is willing 
to devote considerable time and thought to it. There 
is no mystic process by which it can be instantane- 
ously accomplished. We are all familiar with the" fact 
that muscular strength can be developed by almost 
everybody. But it requires time and attention. A 
little effort will result in a little muscular gain. But 
if a man has the ambition to become an athlete he 
should be willing to put forth patient and long con- 
tinued exertion in developing physical strength. And 
just so it is in the matter of evolving the control of 
the mechanism of consciousness. A little attention 
to it will be of some value, but one who would fully 
succeed must resolve in advance to work faithfully at 
the task. 

It seems to be the order of nature that, at the 
level of evolution represented by the average human 
being, the activities of consciousness in the waking 
state, and those of the wider consciousness of the 



106 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

astral realm, shall be separate existences. But as evo- 
lution proceeds, and the lessons which can best be 
learned in the limited physical consciousness are 
largely acquired, the separating walls slowly dissolve, 
and ultimately the two states of consciousness are 
merged in one. When a person has evolved far 
enough for that happy consummation he no longer 
"sleeps" in the ordinary meaning of the word. His 
physical body sleeps, but to his consciousness there 
is no period of apparent oblivion. He is conscious of 
lying down to sleep, conscious of his physical body 
lying on the bed as he moves away from it in his 
astral body, conscious of all that he sees and hears 
and does in the ethereal regions during the night, and 
conscious of his return to his physical body when, in 
the morning, he takes it up for the activities of the 
material world once more. His advance in evolution 
has united the separated fragments that he has called 
days into a continuous whole, and night has ceased 
to exist for him, just as it would for one if one could 
travel rapidly enough to keep always in sight of the 
sun. 

But that marks a fairly high stage in human evolu- 
tion, and those who have reached it have evolved very 
desirable mental and moral qualities. The rest of us 
can at least approximate it, with the requisite effort, 
and can acquire a sufficient degree of control of the 
mind and the emotions to bring much more of the 
astral experiences into the daily life. Those who are 
willing to take the trouble, and who will be patient 



HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 107 

and persevering, can have personal proof of the truth 
of this. 

The first step is to control the process of thinking 
during the waking hours. Most people let the mind 
wander idly from one thing to another. The current 
of their thought is directed almost wholly by external 
things. When the mind is not thus stimulated to 
action it is likely to get its initiative, quite un- 
consciously of course, from the mental activity of 
others in their vicinity — the vagrant thoughts which 
drift through the brain. Such passive indifference to 
mental control is fatal to the extension of conscious- 
ness. One must learn to think about what one is think- 
ing, and acquire the habit of controlling one's thoughts. 
When one begins thus to turn the consciousness back 
upon itself there comes the opportunity for the. ego 
to make its influence felt in the lower mind. Gradu- 
ally the mind can thus be brought under control and 
the connection between the two states of conscious- 
ness be strengthened. The truth in that is obvious. 
Every thoughtful person knows that much thinking 
about any subject brings knowledge of that subject. 
It is undoubtedly the natural order of things that the 
ego, which is the true self, is constantly endeavoring 
to impress the brain consciousness, is exerting a steady 
evolutionary pressure, and the degree of success must 
necessarily be dependent upon the stability of the 
lower mind. 

There are two ways in which the mind receives 
impressions during sleep — from within and from 
without. The former are from the ego, and the latter 



108 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

are the vibrations set up by contact with others' 
vagrant thoughts, or are the automatic action of the 
brain reproducing its own thought images of the day. 
If the mind is thus occupied there is little probability 
that it will be susceptible to the unaccustomed vibra- 
tions from the ego. Only when, through thought 
control during the waking hours, the mind has be- 
come responsive to the higher influences, will there 
be anything from the sleeping state worth remember- 
ing. It then becomes possible for it to register the 
higher vibrations instead of initiating the lower ones. 

But mind control alone is not enough. There 
must also be control of the emotions. The waking 
thoughts and emotions have a powerful and deter- 
mining influence upon the activities of the conscious- 
ness during the hours when the physical body is 
asleep. The trivial in thought and the gross in emo- 
tion are foreign to the ego and widen the gulf that 
separates the lower mind from it. The work in hand 
is to establish the closest possible connection between 
the two, and success will depend largely upon the 
extent to which the daily life can be brought into 
harmony with the life of the ego. Therefore serenity 
of mind and purity of emotions must be cultivated. 

While it is important to have this desirable state of 
mind maintained throughout the waking hours, there 
is perhaps no other moment of them all that is so 
essential to success as the instant of falling asleep at 
night. It seems that the last thought, as one sinks 
into slumber, has an influence out of all proportion 
to the time it occupies the mind. By it the trend ap- 



HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 100 

pears to be given to the mental and emotional activi- 
ties of the night. If the thought is a sensuous one 
it seems to attract its gross affinities from its environ- 
ment, and the mind becomes impervious to higher 
things. But if the mind is deliberately set upon a pure 
and lofty theme, as one falls asleep, the channel is 
open for impressions from the ego which may be re- 
called upon awakening. 

If we reflect a moment upon the fact that there 
can be no memory of an astral experience unless the 
delicate vibrations of astral matter have made their 
impress upon the physical brain, we shall see at once 
the necessity for the most tranquil and favorable con- 
ditions in the lower mind. Worry, and all other 
forms of mental and emotional disturbance, should be 
absent. 

As the instant of sinking into slumber is important 
so, too, that of awakening is another golden moment 
to be improved. We are then nearest to the conscious 
activities of the night, and it is the most propitious 
time for recalling them. The delicate traces of the 
astral vibrations are then at their best, but when the 
physical plane vibrations begin to sweep through the 
brain the astral impressions may soon be obliterated. 
One may write on the smooth sand at the seashore, 
and it is perfectly legible at the time; but when the 
tide comes in the boisterous waves erase it and not 
a trace remains. And so it is with the astral record 
on the physical brain. The vibrations of the workaday 
world ordinarily erase them unless they are the record 
of something that has deeply moved us. Hence the 



110 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

necessity of a little quiet retrospection at the moment 
of awakening, before the mind has been turned to 
the business of the waking hours. 

But while what we can thus recall will help to 
hold the memory of our astral activities, it is not 
usually sufficient to anchor it securely in the waking 
consciousness and, though we may have a vivid recol- 
lection when we first awaken, it is extremely likely 
gradually to fade out until, instead of being able to 
remember the event, we can only remember that there 
was something we wished to remember, while every 
detail of it has vanished in oblivion ! Let the reader 
try the experiment and he will soon discover that the 
instances in which he can remember throughout the 
day the dream incidents that were clear in the morn- 
ing do not constitute the rule, but the exceptions 
to it. 

Now, it is not only the bringing through of the mem- 
ory into the waking state, but also the retention of 
the memory that assists one in uniting the two states 
of consciousness. Means should therefore be em- 
ployed of anchoring the astral experiences firmly in 
the mind. This is not so difficult as would at first 
appear, as the method by which it is accomplished 
is very simple. It consists merely of writing down 
the memory upon awakening. If a pad of paper and 
pencil are left the night before on a stand within 
easy distance one will soon form the habit of reaching 
for them with the first gleam of physical conscious- 
ness. Indeed, the writing is so frequently begun be- 
fore the consciousness is in full possession of the 



HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 111 

physical body that the lines are often difficult to read 
afterward. But the more immediately it is begun the 
better. In advance of the experiment it will not seem 
probable to the beginner that merely having recorded 
the memory will enable him to retain it if he could 
not remember it without the memorandum. He will 
find by experience, however, that with the notes he 
can readily recall it all, while without them he is quite 
helpless. 

The probability of success in recalling the experi- 
ences of the night upon awakening in the morning 
can be greatly increased by resolving before falling 
asleep the night before that the moment the waking 
consciousness returns the memorandum will be made. 
This pre-resolution may also be used to determine 
what one shall do during the night in the astral 
regions. It would appear from careful clairvoyant 
investigations of the matter, that when a person 
strongly resolves before going to sleep that he will 
enter upon a certain course of action he is extremely 
likely to do so. In this way one may begin to make 
his nights, as well as his days, useful to others and to 
himself. He may visit and encourage the ill and the 
despondent among his living friends and, after suffi- 
cient experience, he may have the satisfaction of not 
only bringing the memory of it through into the 
waking hours, but also of being able to establish the 
truth of it by material evidence. One of the simple 
methods by which this is sometimes done is to write 
down in the morning a detailed description of some 
place one has visited often during the sleeping state, 



112 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

but has never seen, or to note the changes that have 
occurred in some place he has seen — as new build- 
ings erected or trees cut down — and then to verify it 
all by physically traveling to the place and inspect- 
ing it. 

If the experimenter is in earnest, and is diligent in 
his efforts to control h^s mind and emotions, he will 
in good time achieve at least some degree of success, 
and that should furnish the motive for farther progress. 
But he should never fall into the error of believing 
that because he is beginning to understand the 
rationale of dreams and is acquiring some accuracy 
in remembering astral experiences he may therefore 
safely use his dream consciousness as a guide in 
physical plane affairs. Of course if there should 
come to him some warning premonition he will use 
his common sense in determining what, if anything, 
he will do. But it would be folly to subordinate the 
reason to astral impressions and thus set aside sober 
judgment in deciding upon a course of action. Only 
when one has succeeded in unifying the physical and 
astral life to the point where he has no break of 
consciousness at all when the body sleeps, can he 
be certain that he may not bring back to the waking 
state a confused memory. He may, or he may not, 
correctly translate the astral experiences in the phys- 
ical brain. He may study the phenomena and he 
may steadily extend the horizon of his consciousness; 
but since he cannot positively know whether his 
memory of a premonition is accurate until the event 



HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 113 

has occurred, it is obvious that he can only use it 
for what it may be worth as a suggestion. 

An extended discussion of the details of the dream 
state is beyond the limits of this little volume but 
there is one characteristic error of translation that 
deserves attention. The dreamer, by sympathetic 
association, often merges his consciousness with that 
of another whom he is observing. Let us say that 
while in the dream state he sees an accident. A 
switchman is run down by a locomotive and an arm 
is cut off. The dreamer upon awakening recalls the 
scene with himself as chief actor in the accident and, 
as he remembers it, his own arm was severed. This 
sympathetic substitution is one of the well established 
points in dream translation and the student of the sub- 
ject often finds corroboration of the fact in the public 
prints. A case in point is the dream of Mrs. Anderson 
mentioned in Chapter III. Only brief reference is 
there made to it but the press reports at the time 
quoted Mrs. Anderson as saying, "On Thursday 
morning I had that awful dream. I dreamed w r e were 
arguing over papers and I thought I was his wife 
and would not sign. Then he grabbed me, raised 
his hand and struck me with a knife." Such substitu- 
tion seems to be common with untrained observers. 
One may possibly dream of seeing himself in his own 
coffin, only because he has in reality seen the funeral 
of another. Only when he becomes skillful in bring- 
ing the memory of his astral experiences through 
into the waking state can he be certain that no errors 
are involved. 



114 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

The element of time is also a cause of confusion. 
When one has a premonition there is often not the 
slightest clue to indicate exactly when the event 
may be expected to occur. This may very possibly 
be because only fragments of the vision have been 
brought through into the brain memory. But what- 
ever the cause the fact remains that the event fore- 
seen may occur the next day or may perhaps be far 
in the future. It is therefore often impossible to base 
any action upon the information. Such fragmentary 
and indefinite information is in the same class with the 
forecast of the future so commonly furnished by the 
untrained clairvoyant or psychic. It may contain 
some truth and yet be absolutely inadequate as a 
basis of action. The point may be illustrated by the 
experience of one of my friends. He was told that 
there was a very desirable position for him at the 
state capitol which he was to fill. This information 
came to him at a time when his fortunes were at 
low tide and he was much in need, not so much of 
"a very desirable position," as of any employment at 
all that might be secured. Filled with new hope he 
borrowed a sufficient sum of money for the long 
journey, went to the capitol building and exhausted 
every possibility that would lead to the fulfillment of 
the prophecy. The result was failure and bitter dis- 
appointment. Several years later he was caught up 
in a popular political movement and was elected 
lieutenant-governor of the state. He then went to 
the capitol building for a term of office and the vision 
of the clairvoyant was justified by the fact. 



HOW TO REMEMBER DREAMS 115 

Among the similar cases that have come under 
my observation is that of a mining prospector and 
his partner who were told that great wealth was 
ahead of them and they went rejoicing to their 
work. Years of the most commonplace experience 
followed in which, like thousands of other gold 
seekers, they managed barely to exist. Finally one of 
them became discouraged and disgusted and aban- 
doned the enterprise. The other man leased and 
worked small claims for several more years when, 
quite unexpectedly, a "pocket" was uncovered and he 
retired with considerable wealth. Whether or not 
the clairvoyant really foresaw this denouement the 
information, as in the instance above given, was 
misleading and worthless. Thousands of people are 
continually following the advise of pseudo-psychics 
to their sorrow, quite overlooking the fact that, 
although the predictions may often contain some 
truth, physical affairs cannot usually be directed by 
them. And precisely so it is with dreams. Their 
utility lies chiefly in the fact that they disclose to 
us the real nature of human consciousness. They 
sometimes give a useful warning, and often furnish 
much consolation, but, because it is usually impossible 
for the average person to bring them through into 
the waking consciousness with accuracy, they can be 
profitably acted upon only when due allowance has 
been made for their limitations. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Dreams of the Dead 

Perhaps there is no direction in which the correct 
understanding of dreams can prove so useful as in 
relation to our departed friends. Anything that can 
in some degree lessen the sorrow caused by their 
absence is certainly worthy of careful study. 

As a matter of fact the so-called dead are not 
dead at all, but they are none the less separated from 
the living or, to put it more accurately, the living 
are separated from their departed friends; but only 
because, during the waking hours the consciousness 
is confined to the physical brain, which is both its 
instrument and its limitation. During the waking- 
hours the human being is functioning through his 
astral body plus his physical body, the latter being 
surrounded and interpenetrated by the matter of the 
former. When he falls asleep the dense body is left 
behind. He is then functioning through his astral 
body, which is whal: the miscalled dead are also 
doing. The living and the "dead" are, therefore, 
again together. If, fortunately, the bereaved person 
remembers it in the morning, he thinks he has had a 
dream. 

Now, since dreams are ot two kinds — memories 
of astral experiences and memories of impressions 



118 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

caused by the automatic activity of the physical brain 
and its etheric counterpart — this memory of the de- 
parted may be either the one or the other. If the 
cause of the dream is the brain pictures, they are 
likely to be related to scenes through which the 
dreamer has recently passed, possibly the events of 
the last days of the departed. If the dream is the 
memory of an astral experience, a visit to the 
departed — it is likely to be more vivid and realistic. 
In such a case the experience is life-like, the time 
passes joyously and the dreamer often awakens with 
a feeling of blissful exaltation, for he has really been 
with the loved one and the joy he has felt is reflected 
in the waking consciousness. Unfortunately, with 
the person, who does not understand the facts as 
they are, this uplifting emotion is immediately 
quenched by the gloomy belief that it is all a phantasy 
of the brain. 

This belief is unfortunate for more than one 
reason. It prevents the dreamer cultivating the art 
of bringing the memory of such association more 
fully into the waking state, while the depression of 
the bereaved person acts disastrously upon the one 
who is mourned as dead and lost. It is, of course, 
natural that the belief that one is separated from 
those he loves for the remainder of this life should 
cause great sorrow. If the fact were known that the 
separation is only on the part of the one who remains 
behind, and that that is confined to the hours of 
waking consciousness, the grief would be greatly 
modified. To know that whether we remember it or 



DREAMS OF THE DEAD 119 

not, whether we dream or do not dream, we are 
always with the departed during the hours of sleep, 
if there is an attracting tie of love between us, would 
soon bring permanent serenity instead of the hope- 
less despair that is so common and so unfortunate 
for everybody concerned. Depressing emotions are 
bad enough for the living but very much worse for 
those for whom they mourn. As the physical body 
is the instrument of action, the astral body is the 
vehicle of emotion. In the waking state an emotion 
arises in the astral body and passes outward into the 
physical mechanism, a large percentage of its energy 
being exhausted in setting the physical particles in 
motion. Consequently emotions are very much 
keener in the astral life than in the physical. It is 
no exaggeration to say that a given cause will pro- 
duce a very great deal more of either joy or sorrow 
in the astral life than in the physical. Therefore 
when bereaved people give way to unrestrained 
sorrow and despair they are doing the worst thing 
possible for their departed friends. 

We have only to reflect upon the fact that we are 
all more or less affected by the elation and the de- 
pression of people about us to understand that emo- 
tions are contagious. Persons who habitually indulge 
that form of depression commonly knoAvn as "the 
blues" are injuriously affecting all who come near 
them in proportion to the sensitiveness of their 
victims. Life may thus be made quite miserable for 
those who are extremely sensitive. Multiply that 
effect many times and it will give some idea of the 



120 DREAMS AND PREMONITIONS 

disastrous results to their "dead" friends of the grief 
and despair of which they are the helpless cause. 
Such mourning, in the last analysis, is not on account 
of any fate that awaits them but is caused by our sense 
of personal loss; and when we reflect upon the fact that 
such grief on our part brings still greater sorrow to them 
the value of a knowledge of the facts becomes apparent. 

There is but one sensible attitude to assume 
toward those who have passed on. We should think 
of them as cheerfully as possible and never with 
longing regret and the desire that they should be 
with us again. They are with us every night that we 
sleep and a little patient consideration of that fact 
will be likely to bring to most people an increasing 
serenity and joy. 

If people were better able to bring accurate 
memories of astral experiences into the waking life 
it would no doubt often be of the greatest satisfaction 
to those who have passed over to the other life as 
well as to the dreamer. There are a number of cases 
on record in which those who have passed on sud- 
denly, without leaving full information about their 
affairs behind them, have endeavored for a long time 
to pass such knowledge back before they succeeded. 
Who shall say how many never succeed at all ? The 
Reeves Snyder case and the Moore case, in Chapter 
III, are examples of the recovery of valuables which, 
especially in the Moore case* would probably have 
been forever lost to the surviving relatives but for 
the fortunate dream. It was more than two years 



DREAMS OF THE DEAD 121 

after the death of Mr. Moore that the buried coin 
was recovered. Who can guess how long he had been 
endeavoring to reveal the hiding place of the little 
fortune to his wife and what he suffered by the long 
delay, and the fear that his failure to impart the 
information at the time the money was secreted 
might be the cause of continued poverty? 

Very much of the heartache caused by death 
would disappear if the truth about the "dead" were 
known and the facts about sleep and dreams were 
understood. The least that we can do for our part 
is to recognize the relationship that exists in conscious- 
ness between our departed friends and ourselves and, 
by study of the facts and by serious efforts at the 
control of the mind and the emotions, bring about 
the conditions that will enable us to get much 
consolation from the truth instead of remaining 
ignorant of it. 



THE OCCULTISM IN THE 
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By Ij. W. Rogers 



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